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WordPerfect Back From the Wilderness
Man With Broom writes "Just when you thought they were riding off into the sunset, they come back into town and start hanging around the mayor's oldest girl... WordPerfect 12 was described today on news.com, with Corel claiming compatibility for the small business user. But can they withstand the juggernaut? And what of OpenOffice?"
Windows Users will use m$ office.
...
Mac users will use sun's StarOffice, or
Free Software users, will use something under an OSS certified license.
Nop, i don't see a market for corel
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The full version will sell for $300, and upgrades from a previous version of WordPerfect or a competing product will cost $150.
Why bother when OpenOffice is equally as good and costs nothing? Not to mention it is open source.
It doesn't seem like there is a huge market available for Windows options.. Even if they come up with some great leap in technology, how long will it take MS to "embrace and extend" it?
They need to go somewhere MS really doesn't want to.. like Linux. Make a cross-platform suite that works in Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Force MS to legitimize Linux on the desktop, or give the market to you.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
Even I don't use WP (in fact I use OO to open documents - not to create them) I'm glad that WP survived because there is one more thing I (or any one) can choose if need it. The worst thing for software is to become one and only solution. With WP running, OO will be better, M$ Office will be better, GOffice will be better and so on...
/ss
Alot of times this mimics the sale of college text books. They change the numbers of the problems and add a few pages so they can sell a new edition, it can get quite blatant sometimes. Well in this case they are adding compatibility to the format they create, so that other people with "obsolete" software will also have the need to upgrade. Sounds cynical, but it's good business practice. They also do add genuine code upgrades and functionality, but as you said, not much is really of a huge amount of use to pretty much everyone.
WP has a better markup than word. For example word aligns text on a line by line basis, so if you want something left aligned on the same line as something right aligned you have to use freakin tabs ~:(
Also WP has the best command in any word process. I believe it's called show commands and it brings up a 2nd pane with all the text with it's markup tags. It's freaking wonderfull for tracking down those pesky stray font tags.
Alas I'm forced to use Word so that I'm compatible with the masses. All those converters are to much hassle for how little I actually use a word processor.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Hmmm... ironic that companies like Novell that were on the brink of being nothing adopted Linux as their new strategy to get cash flow positive. And Sun, who many thought were on the way out, are being forced to swallow Linux more and more. Its no secret that Corel jumped into Linux quite some time ago, but perhaps the market is a bit better for them now. Many companies are still shy of StarOffice simply because Sun has been so Linux wishy-washy the last few years. And while OpenOffice is good, it has neither the history of Corel Office, nor the compatibility (at least looking back... Corel Office was much more compatible with Office 2000 than OpenOffice ever was). Perhaps the time is right for Corel Office to once again be what Word Perfect was before MS came to town. And with a cross-platform base, perhaps they can topple some of the MS dominance.
Now if only someone (Corel, OO, Sun, etc) would put together something like Ximian's Evolution, but have it co-exist with an office suite, maybe we'd have a good, robust, cross-platform office suite worth switching too.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
Much will be said about the continued use of WordPerfect in law offices where it has been a traditional choice. We still use WP 5.1 for DOS to create our bills but this is dictated by our ancient accounting system which will be gone by year-end. (Thank $DEITY)
However, any law firm sysadmin worth his salt recognized long ago that the current legal document creation paradigm involves cooperative collaboration with clients absolutely none of whom will be using any version of WordPerfect. In addition, the pool of new legal secretaries will all be coming with Word as their background. The look of shock on our new recruit's faces after they've gone through the WP billing section of their training is a sad sight but one that reflects the reality that, for even Wordperfect's most loyal users, the time has come to use what the market requires. Legal documents are no longer created in isolation.
OpenOffice is nice to dream about but the forces that dicate a move to Word for a firm of any size are what is currently keeping OO out.
The most successful law firms in the future will be able to define a new, non-document-based legal information exchange paradigm. We need to get past the days of everything being done in the word processor.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
What would be the benefit to the people who own the Wordperfect code base to gain market share at zero dollars per unit sold? 'Socking it to Microsoft' is only a valid business goal when there's renumeration available for the product sold.
I know, I know. Let's hear some preaching about the benefits of giving it all away for free.
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Reveal codes
MS Word is better than it used to be, but I'll tell you, when it's doing something wonky, I really miss being able to reveal the formatting codes so I could see why the entire previous paragraph was stuck as heading 3.
Formatting is really just markup (like HTML) - why can't Word show us where it starts and ends when we want to see what's wrong?
Problem is, it wasn't just WordPerfect that was perfect; it was the pre-WYSIWYG editor that was perfect. WordPerfect 5.1 on DOS was the pentultimate editor for serious document authoring -- footnotes, endnotes, tables, formulae. We lost something when the focus shifted to mouse-obsessed, think-for-you, GUIs. I've invested as much effort in M$ Word trying to shut off all the automagic, on-the-fly corrector crap as I have learning what the application is capable of. Word is the PHB of editors -- doesn't matter what facts and rationality (ie: keystrokes) you present; it does whatever the hell it wants, even though that might change your purchase order to read "500 Penises" because you typed "penes" instead of "pens."
Actually WYSIWYG is maybe the worst thing that ever happened to word processors.
Because of that 'feature' nobody knows how to use a Word processor nowadays. I've seen so many people putting in spaces to get some tabulations and stuff like that...
Iraq: war to save the U
Submit a feature request. This is probably the first anyone outside lawyerdom has heard of this, so tell them what you need and odds are it'll happen. Maybe OO.o 1.2 will be Lawyer Compatible(tm).
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Also, for some reason WP makes it VERY difficult to get service packs. On MSO, you can just use Office Update, or download the whole thing for yourself.
You don't have much experience with office update. For many of the office updates to work, you have to find the original CD that office was installed from to that computer. Did you lose your CD and buy a replacement? Tough. You have to remove & reinstall office.
If you made an administrative install of office on a network share, you can only run the updates from that administrative install. Did you move the network share to another server? Tough. You have to remove & reinstall office.
Not to mention that many office updates refuse to install on a win2k server if you are logged on through terminal services. You have to log on to the console. Or use VNC.
Uh, to those bitching about stability issues - if we're talking about WP verses Word, I'll take WP any day of the week. At least if WP crashes you can almost always recover. I used to do tech support for Word and cant count the amount of times users Word installations got fried so badly nothing short of uninstalling it and completely wiping all references of it from the registry would allow it to function again. And though it's had rough spots here and there, at least it's never had the problems with promiscuous macro viruses that Word had....
I'd check your configuration ... I run WP8 and CorelDraw v8 on an ancient P233/128mb, and it's plenty nimble there. On the P3-500/768mb, I have WP11 and CorelDraw v11, and it's also slick. I mostly use the PhotoPaint component, and it runs rings around Photoshop6 on the same machine, and for that matter around PSP7 as well. Rendering time is maybe 1/4th of what the same operation takes in Photoshop, plus particularly with JPGs I have more control over the output quality (and Corel's files average about 30% smaller for the same compression level).
And as to Reveal Codes, there's nothing else in the same league. Trying to tweak complex formatting any other word processor is like being blind, gagged, and hands tied behind your back.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
1) It runs on every major platform, both windows and linux variants. From the user perspective, you get the same interface even if you upgrade your computer or your OS or both.
2) The products are mature. Emacs is 25 odd years old, Latex is at least 12 (can't be bothered to check). You get the benefit of features people have been using and/or asking about for many years.
3) Both products are extremely configurable. Their default configurations may not be familiar to you, but then that's going to be true of any new piece fo software you have to learn.
4) Advantages for writers: Emacs is an editor. You see what you write, you don't see formatting. It has literally thousands of commands in its menu (invoked via ALT+X+command name). It also has a small visible menu for frequently used commands, which looks like a menu bar. Emacs tries to operate intelligently (for example, if you replace text, it looks at capitalization and tries to do the right thing) and cleanly (for example, you have commands which operate on letters only, commands which operate on words, commands which operate on lines, commands which operate on paragraphs). Emacs has color coded syntax display. So when you use something like Latex below, you see the formatting codes in different colours, and if you make a mistake, the colours bleed through from where the mistake started.
5) Advantages for writers: Latex is a formatting language, like HTML in a way. Its commands are close to English, and stand out like the WP formatting codes do. With Emacs or vi, the codes can be colored so they stand out even more. The Latex output is printer indepenent. This is probably the most important feature. You never have to worry about whether your document will print the same on different printers. Once you select a document class you like, you will never play around with formatting paragraphs just right again in your life.
6) Disadvantages for nonwriters: Emacs is very complex, and hard to learn to master fully. Power users reprogram the keystrokes to their preferences, which confuses the crap out of newbies. It's what you see is what you type, not wysiwyg.
7) Disadvantages for nonwriters: Latex has problems with placing images exactly where you want them. This is partly because it tries to fill pages with a minimum text density so they look balanced. If you like to spend 80% of your time laying out text rather than typing it, you'll be hacking your own document class forever.
Give it a try sometime, or at least check out the Emacs Wiki and the CTAN tex/latex archive.
Novell did NOT buy WPCorp to get the WordPerfect office suite. They bought WPCorp to get *GroupWise* -- which Novell still owns.
This isn't really true. The CEO of Novell at the time made it very clear that they wanted to compete head-to-head with Microsoft in the client realm using WordPerfect and DR-DOS. There was a few versions of WordPerfect with very blatent Novell branding.
Only later when it was clear that was a loser strategy did Novell say "Well, for the $kajillon we paid for WordPerfect, at least we got GroupWise" (which honestly wasn't a very good client anyway).
The sad thing about all of this that Novell was so worried about office suites and email that they forgot about their core market of small server systems. They let UNIXWare just kinda disappear, got focused on enterprise directories, missed out on the Internet Boom, and Windows NT just took over most of Novell's market.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Anyways, in conclusion, the reaveal-codes function in Wordperfect does not allow you to create a mess, but will let you get out of one quickly.
For the record, I'm actually opposed to the widespread use of either program due to the closed nature of both of their formats, which is intended to lock the user in. Couple that with the complete absence of a batch convert command for either (and frankly, macros to do the converting require a farily good knowledge of VB (for Word), which is something *I* have, but not most people).
More importantly though...
Its fairly obvious that you a) don't know what the reveal codes command in Word Perfect does, and b) you don't actually understand the purpose of the command you just mentioned.The people at MS, and the various "Word is perfect" people are in denial about the utility of WP's reveal codes command. While it is true that Word doesn't actually use tags in the sense that WP does, this doesn't excuse the fact that other than the visual appearance of the text there is no way to tell what formatting is taking place. Word 2002 has a "Reveal Formatting Task Pane", and if anyone who knows what they're talking about can tell me if its comperable to reveal codes I'd appreciate it, I don't have 2002.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003