Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I didn't know WordPerfect ever went anywhere. I know a lot of Windows users who swear by it. Apparently it has a better equation editor then MS Office.
once you go slack, you never go back
They have word perfect for OSX?
70s? How old are u kid? Try mid 80s.
I always wondered why all those people want to have the latest versions of WordPerfect or Word. I mean, most of them don't even know how to use styles, page numbers, different fonts or other features anyways. In that way, nothing has changed in the past 15 years. WYSIWYG isn't anything either, since what I see as the average markup in a standard letter sent by Joe Average User is just as ugly on screen as it is on hardcopy.
This is a replacement signature.
I used to do Technical Support for WordPerfect way-back-when. It was always a better product than Word on its own. As someone else stated, people do swear by the product (law offices are a HUGE market for them, as is the US DoJ).
The price that Corel is offering it for does not suggest that they want it to be a significantly less expensive alternative to Office, and that's too bad. The only way they can reasonably expect to gain market share is by a combination of name and price.
That said, I'm not sure who they're marketing this too. The article doesn't suggest it's anything more useful than OpenOffice (improved compatibility with Microsoft Office? they've been touting that since WP8!), and OpenOffice still has a hard to beat price.
I can't imagine there's anything here to win back market share. Sorry Corel.
-m.
I remember WordPerfect fondly, ever since the first release, later down the road to Windows versions. Then sadly, work dictated that I must use Word, never cared for it very much it's improved greatly.
Now I've switched to OSX as my primary focus, and Novell/Corel have left us out to die (I'm sure many of you are happy about that). But I'd like some more established alternatives, it'd be great to see WordPerfect come back to the Mac.
OpenOffice is slated for a native version for OSX, but that's years down the road. The X11 version is pretty nice, I like it, but for my spoiled habits, it's not cutting it just yet. But I have high hopes for it none-the-less.
ThinkFree is interesting, but it's responsiveness is frustrating on older equipment.
Appleworks, nuff said...
We want more from Corel than just KPT and Painter. Office X 2004 looks nice, but the price and ethics aren't. Bring us WordPerfect.
I believe that the best way for Wordperfect to join the fray is to open source the bugger. Then lets see Microsoft run screaming when WP is running on every platform known to mankind, including Windows.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I can still remember WP for Linux. It wasn't too bad actually. It ran a little debian if you didn't have decent hardware, but for a while was the best choice for word processing. I never had it crash on me. At the time I had it working on FreeBSD with Linux emulation, and I'm pretty sure I installed it from the ports collection.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I think the only reason Novell bought WordPerfect was to get at GroupWise.
Once they had GroupWise, they sold off the rest of the s/w they got in the deal.
Then they intergrated GroupWise into the Novell Netware Directory Services.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
for one damn reason, Save a file as a Wordperfect 11 file, open it in wordperfect 8, and "Holy Crap", it works.. Formatted correctly, no nasty errors, it doesn't force you to upgrade all your computers office-wide to be compatible...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Since 5.1 days, WordPerfect was always my choice for writing documents. While MS-Word stayed inside my harddrive for rare occasions of opening incompatible documents that WP couldn't open, I used WP extensively. Since I began using Linux, however, things changed quite a bit. Though I used WP8 for Linux in the beginning, I later moved to OpenOffice, which possesses greater interoperability. Now my day to day tool for writing has been replaced completely with OpenOffice.
I was extremely disappointed when Corel stopped developing WP for Linux. I still wonder if Corel will ever release open source version of WP and regain some market share in wordprocessing. Even if they do, however, it is probably too late to regain their position in the business. MS locked in customers with their products and expanded their business. On the other hand, WordPerfect's proprietary format choked its own neck. sigh...
incompetent assignment of functions to function keys (WP5.1)
gross incompatibility between DOS and Windows versions (ragged right Courier on DOS came into Windows WP as justified Symbol
every WP doc I ever explored had more tab stops than Carter's had pills -- and none of the docs was ever consistently formatted wrt those tab stops
So why would anyone want to restore that pain???
--- Bill
Basically my proof of this statement is "Because my dad (a lawyer) said so," so take this with a boulder-sized grain of salt if necessary. All of his legal forms for dealing with the district courts and the Fifth Circuit are in WP format, dating back to maybe 1996 (or whenever Corel made WP 6). They now are distributed in PDF, though.
Anyway, at least he swears by WP. He's in the other room, using it right now, in fact.
My experience was that reveal codes was essential because their cleanup of embedded codes was incompetent. Example: Select a word, bold the word, unbold the word, then look at the embedded codes. Too often I found that instead of removing the embedded codes, they embedded a second set that negated the first. Eventually the file might be filled with such garbage, with the result that later changes misbehaved. Using reveal codes was the only path I knew for cleaning up WP's screwups.
But in fairness, I was never committed to WP, and never wanted to be, so I only used it under duress. Gurus may have solutions to these problems (but I content that the problems should never have existed.)
The product name was supreme folly.
--- Bill
Shouldn't be too hard, WP 8 didn't involve any sort of a GUI, it was a DOS based program.
I used to install it for people in the 80's but hated it because I just didn't know how to use it. I could install it but couldn't use it.
Well, I finally learned how to use it and found it to be an extremely powerful and useful word processor and to this day I still miss some of the features it had. I found it extremely useful to be able to delete columns of text rather than only being able to delete horizontally in serial fashion. And the macro features were exceptionally nice too. Man, after a few months of intensive screwing around, I had gotten quite good with WP..
I wish they would port it to Linux. I quit using WP in the early 90's but I would use it again if they could bring back the version 7 or version 8 program to run on Linux..
It's so interesting. I now work in the same complex that the original WordPerfect corporation build back in it's glory days. The place is huge! It's hard to believe that all these buildings were full of people coding WordPerfect 6 for Windows 3.1.
One bad monkey spoils the whole barrel.
The use of keyboard shortcuts is limited, I suspect, to those of us old enough to have been skilled before the GUI appeared. By the time I had WP 5.1 shoved in my face, I had used WordStar, and then MS Word (DOS), and then had blissfully adopted Sprint, which always and painlessly rendered my intent into well-formatted output. Even now, a dozen years later, when I open an old file (paper, you remember those?), I can tell at a glance anything that was output from Sprint, and it still looks better than anything now, other than the output from a good page-formatting product.
--- Bill
And that's still out there too.
The one thing that is silly is that we have this notion that we all have to be on the same word processor, when, we really don't.
This is my sig.
This may be a bit off topic, however ...
.cdr files.
Back when MS Word was starting to steal marketshare from WP, Word made it easier to migrate for WP users by having an explicit "Help for WordPerfect". In Word, you could type in the WP way of doing something and get a help menu that showed you how to do the same thing in Word. If I was forced to use Word, this was a lifesaver. I wonder if one of the distros might do something like that. "Help for Windows Users". Perhaps OO could have "Help for Word Users".
I think I agree with those who say that software is becoming a comodity. Corel was a supporter of Linux, got burned, and gave it up. Too bad. I think they are pretty much doomed if they don't adapt their business plan. Sooner or later Dell or HP will bundle OO for free rather than a cheap but not free WP.
The reason I went to Windows in the first place was to get CorelDraw. Well now the OpenOffice drawing stuff does enough of the stuff I needed CorelDraw for that the only reason I use Corel any more is to read old
Which raises the question: If they saw fit to make dedicated keys for relatively obscure operations like "Print Screen" and "Scroll Lock", why didn't they think to assign one for "Help"?
Because OO isn't even compatible with other versions of Open Office.
When trying to assemble a report for a group project last semester (one of us on a windows machine with OO, one using OO in X11 emulation on OSX and one using a supposedly compatible version of Word on OSX) we encountered so many obscure formatting gremlins that we simply couldn't continue. The amount of effort involved in importing a document from Open Office on windows to Open Office on OSX was far too much. We ended up simply taking screen shots in the native environment, and photoshopping them together.
In the end, we switched to notepad, VI and BBEdit. At least it saves in ascii.
(And don't even get me started on OpenOffice on SunOS. The bugs in that application destroyed the work of almost an entire class worth of students last semester. Every one of us encountered it to the tune of 'what the fsck is my screen doing!! Where did my file go! Why the fsck do I have a garbage where a file once was?! Fsck!!')
In short, the Word Processing Suite in Open Office is not flexible enough for a corporate setting. Maybe if you all use the same operating system, with the same version of OO. But not if you intend to send files to other users on other computers using other (or even the same) applications.
Mac user's use Microsoft Office.
One of the main reasons often given by technical people who switch to Macs (such as scientists) is that it is a Unix that can run Office.
They did not come out with a windows version fast enough and the market left them behind.
Contrary to many of the comments made here, which shows misunderstandings of the word processing and os markets back in the good old days of floppies and text displays...
Reveal Codes, is only a useful feature if the product does not behave as expected. Reveal codes helped people force the program to do what it wanted to do, because occasionally the program didn't *do* what it wanted them to do. And in the real world, this problem has largely gone away. With a WYSIWYG display you simply do not have the issues that you had when you had to guess how your document would print.
The reasons that WP were dominant were two-fold. First they had the largest library of printer drivers. You could print on practically any type of printer technology.
Secondly, they could be trusted in how the text would break and that line-numbers could be trusted no matter what device you printed to. This was a vital feature that insured that the largest group of paper generators at the time (lawyers) set the marketplace, and set the market. WordPerfect could not be touched... They were as dominant then as Microsoft is now. But they failed to change when it needed to be changed.
The first feature became moot, as the Operating System provided an imaging model (GDI) and a device driver model to output that model. Wordperfect in their dominance, having them create a driver for your device was critical to your devices success. Windows freed the Printer Manufacturers from the "tyranny" of the of the word-perfect monopoly. Thier products would work as expected with ALL programs that were designed for windows, rather than making drivers for ALL programs, they could focus on a single driver.
Technology would obsolesce almost all character printers for ones based on a bitmapped display (Laser and Inkjet).
True WYSIWYG display of the page, and that the display imaging model and the printing imaging model were the same, then the display could be trusted. And all the problems that required reveal codes went away.
Creating documents that looked like they printed. Were huge driving factors to the rapid adoption by lawyers, and by a huge new group of people that actually wanted to create documents, but couldn't before, office workers.
Word Perfect missed the boat. They were the presumptive champions but they just could not get to market, and by then Microsoft won.
As to the UI... There were several types of users and writers out there. The most computer savvy of them all, were the ones that had been using word processors for years. The *HUGE* market to come, well nearly everybody, didn't know how to futz with computers.
I can make Word a blank piece of paper. With no menus, just me and the page, and I can invite, or disinvite any piece of underlying technology that gets in my way.
I as a company can assume that the type of person who could do this, would be the type of person that would figure out HOW to do it.
The Unwashed masses needed as much help as possible. And it worked, millions, billions(?) of users started making documents they had always wanted to make, even without a bunch of specialized knowledge.
And that describes Words dominance. It was, and arguably is, the most powerful word processor, with fully custimizable UI depending on the needs, skill, and tasks of the user. This generated, possibly, the longest most sustained growth in productivity in human history.
Word Perfect was just too late to the new way of doing things... And the name and history was not enough to comeback against word.
The truth is for the business world that pays their labor, even with a value proposition of *free* for openoffice, there are going to be too many issues and problems added by not being word, that OO is still not ready for primetime. If it happens (It may never happen), it will just take over the market almost imm
Robert J. Sawyer and other sci-fi authors claim WordStar for DOS is still the best.
Reveal codes are only useful for people who don't know how to use Word.
Going back 5 major versions (and probably farther), Word has had support for styles. Styles allow you to take a block of text and apply either a character style (for a group of characters within a paragraph) or a paragraph style (for an entire block of characters terminated with a paragraph character). This is a very, very powerful feature.
The problem is that nobody knows how to use it, and they use the auto-formatting features. You can spot these people a mile away--they bitch about grammar check, numbering errors, re-typing large blocks of text, etc.
If you're using styles correctly, you'll never need anything resembling "reveal codes" to fix your formatting problems. If you use the manual formatting functions, you're asking for trouble.
On the other hand, I personally eschew both WP and MS Word for Adobe FrameMaker. Now there's a true power user's word processor! :)
Nathan
A bit of history: WP6-8 for UNIX were developed by SDC, under contract from WordPerfect Corp and later Corel. They were good programs and the only good word processsors for UNIX. Corel dropped SDC and never fixed the bugs with WP8, then decided to use Wine for the next version of WP -- WP2000. The idea was good, but they used emulation, not winelib. WP2000 was the start of the death of WordPerfect on UNIX. The final nail in the coffin was when Microsoft bailed out Corel to encourage them to drop WP/UNIX and to support
Soon afterwards, Dr. Copland left Corel and Corel dropped Corel Linux and any support for Linux versions of WP.
I used to use WP. I am moving all my WP to OO or Word. They were great, but really messed it up.
I wish them luck, but they are 5 years too late.
As reported here.
At the time, I thought this meant that Wordperfect would basically become an alternative sister product to Word with full compatability. Why am I getting the impression from these comments that they are competing with Word?
I understand WP zealots. Besides my own very positive experience with WP, I am addicted TeX user now. The addiction is not that I don't won't learn MS Word - as a matter of fact I know MS Word very well. Too well to criticisize where it's weak, and well enough to to try to fix its weaknesses by stealing usage concepts from Tex world.
For example, I edit fonts of individual words or paragraphs as an exception. Ususally I edit fonts in styles. The problem is that MS Word is badly designed to use styles.
Well, MS Word is badly designed for any intellectual usage. If you create a document, type 50 pages, then redefine most of styles, then type 50 more pages - soo you'll hate MS Word and Microsoft. the document will grow huge (10 MB even without bitmap pictures), MS Word will exit with fatal errors, and there are chances that your document can be corrupted any moment.
Such problem can never appear with TeX. First, the format is open and transparent - it's easy to fix problems in any text editor. Second, there is a processor that can give you enough diagnostic/debugging info. Third, you can use wysiwyg modes/editors and see/edit the code in paralel in two windows/panes, like in WP. But the main advantage is that you define your styles separately from the document and thus you separate different aspects.
Of course using a full power of TeX is not for novices. But with editors like TeXmacs, TeX can be used by novices - it's not more difficut than WP in reveal-code-mode.
Less is more !
I've got a friend with a C64. He loves it and won't trade it for anything. I told him I could emulate a C-64 with fuck-all CPU and he replied with "Emulamer!"
He also has a laser disc player (bought it a month or so ago), a couple of reel-to-reels and a tabletop Galaga that he's converted into an Atari 2600 (you insert the cartridges into the side)
Did you realise that the demo scene on the C-64 is still alive and well and that they're pushing out impressive stuff? If you're a true geek (esp. if you're a "demo" geek) you'd be suprised at what these C-64 geeks have managed to accomplish. I sure was.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Someone needs to marry these apps and make them settle down.
Yeah right. Exactly. They're promiscuous. Only trouble with that is - it wasn't their fault. Don't know whose it was? Look northwest - way northwest.
For the longest time, Gates ignored WP and Kahn (Borland) both. Kahn got Quattro Pro going; he also had the only IDE for Windows that worked; and WP was dominant everywhere, around the globe. They'd started on minis, and when it came to PCs, as so many have pointed out, they wiped the competition on DOS.
But Gates wakes up late and then goes after his target ruthlessly. Gates denied WP the info on Windows 3.1 his company had promised them. He didn't care if they tired of waiting and hacked into the system themselves (which they admit they did) or just didn't come out with a product - it was time for Word and it was time for Office, it was time for Visual who-knows-what, and it was time to make even more money and to totally crush the competition.
The word processor war began shortly thereafter - probably instigated by Gates (who else). Every week MS would produce statistics proving their Word was the most used word processor in the world; then WP would counter with more realistic statistics of their own, and so forth.
And the WP printing routines were notorious. Admins used to say that if the printers were down, someone was using WP again.
Gates came from behind, dealt both Kahn and WP a blow, and then the two of them united for a short time. I believe Borland actually helped with WP 6 for Windows. I know I still have two copies of the official soundtrack [yes, they had a CD soundtrack].
But as the lead-in said, going up against the juggernaut is not an easy business. Coding might not have always been stellar at WP, but it was a damned sight better than Redmond's ever been capable of, if one discounts Cutler's Tribe. This 'promiscuity' is mostly about what Gates does to his colleagues in the business - the exemplary way he treats his fellow 'software architects'.
Like was said above in another post, WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature was akin to showing HTML tags in your document. You worked with a horizontally split screen. WYSIWYG/paperspace in the top window and document markup codes in the bottom window. You could change codes in the bottom window or use fast keys and icons to change markup in the WYSIWYG window. If you changed a code (that is removed or added a markup tag, which was a graphical box with a word in it surrounding, ie either side, text) in the lower window the upper window would be immediately altered so you saw what you needed to see and could CTRL-Z if it sucked.
I have my own copy of WordPerfect 9.0, my company's volume licensed MS Word 2003 and OpenOffice 1.1 on this PC. (I'm at work, they let me do whatever it takes to get the job done.) Word's ability to show formatting marks doesn't approach WP's "reveal codes". And I still use OpenWriter and WP9 to open Word documents from clients who only use MS Word, that MS WORD itself can't or mangles the display. I usually then export to PDF, print to paper or export it to Word 5 format.
Anyone who has written a paper with any significant amount of math, equation cross-referencing and citations using LaTeX knows just how much agony there is using Word.
Yes, and the same text file I produced in 1988 to create a book-quality typeset document works today on an entirely different machine, and it cost me not a cent. You can grep, diff, cvs commit all you want with these files, too. They're not locked into some impenetrable binary format that's likely to rust over the years as new versions come out.
"Provided by the management for your protection."