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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?"
They wanna know where they can buy those funky plastic sheets you put over the keyboard to remind you what Ctrl_Shift_Alt_F5 means in WordPerfect.
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?
How can recognize a drowning WP user?
He's yelling F3! F3!
New Commodore 64 comes out, with 4.8 Ghz proccesser.
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Is it me or do some of these applications seem like cheap, drunk floozies being passed around for different people to dance with at a party?
How many different owners did Painter go through? And Wordperfect? And Poser? And Bryce?
Someone needs to marry these apps and make them settle down.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
You'd of thought they would have perfected it by now.
Well wordperfect used to lead, I guess while its not leading anymore they are still cranking out copies regardless. They do have a good plan for OEM on new computers though. Alot of compaqs and hps have wordperfect installed on them. $0.02
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
Word Perfect never left the confines of my heart. I love that software dearly. And what about OpenOffice? I say it's a perfectly good alternate right after Word Perfect and right before Clippy.
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.
here
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.
Wordperfect $35
Extra modules $15
No #@$%#$*& paperclip.... Priceless
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From the news.com article:
...
"We're not in the double digits yet for upselling people to the full suite, but we are making progress," he said.
I think they've got some work to do
Oh no... it's the future.
"We're not in the double digits yet for upselling people to the full suite, but we are making progress," he said.
not in double digits? that maxes out at 9
Gotta love a company who still "implements Comparable" with a single number comparison instead of requiring 25 lines of code like other *cough* MS *cough* companies.
You're thinking of "Caldera". Don't worry, they're easy to get mixed up. They both begin with the letter C, and they both sold failed Linux distributions.
It is also possible you're thinking of Canopy, who owns Caldera and also begins with the letter C.
Just repeat after me: C is for Cookie. That is good enough for me.
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.
A while back, Novell used to own a significant share of both Corel and SCO. In 1996, Novell decided to sell off both of them. Article Here.
WordStar
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.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
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
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
You can't cage WordPerfect, man. It's gotta be free.
Well I hope they can get a tenth person to upgrade, I'll bet they need the money...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
It's not to late for a comeback
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.
Seriously though...there was NO Clippy
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
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?
What's REALLY scary is those WP 5.1 cultists who won't go away. Truely frightening.
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.
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...
Well, word perfect (the whole WP Office Suite acutally) was once owned by Novell.
-CowboyNick
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?
Most word processors offer substantially the same feature set. But there are at least three key areas where I think WordPerfect has an edge:
1) Draft Mode. This is the mode most people do their writing in, and I love WordPerfect's minimalism. Lots and lots of space for the text you're working on, and minimal clutter since they don't try to include access to every blasted feature in the ruler bar. OpenOffice's version of draft mode, such as it is, is called "Online Layout" and it's still cluttered looking and IMHO garbagey. MS Word's Draft Mode seems more cluttered than WordPerfect's., and suffers from too many autoedit things turned on, where the word processor incorrectly anticipates your needs.
2) Better writing environment. WordPerfect doesn't try to implement every last feature a business user could conceivably want. So the menus and so forth are far less cluttered, which makes the main features you need much easier to find. Add to this that MS Word's grammar checker is a piece of crap, while WordPerfect will actually make some interesting comments. I think if you're trying to write for a living, WordPerfect is a wonderful tool.
3) Reveal Codes. I've heard MS Word is trying to implement this feature, but WordPerfect's had it forever, and it's sensational. Have you ever used a WYSIWYG wordprocessor, and all of a sudden wondered why your text at a certain point has the formatting go to hell? And the only way to fix things is to delete a chunk of your text?
Well, with WordPerfect, you can see the hidden formatting codes embedded in your text. So it makes locating a problem code easy. In a long document, it makes tracing a piece of corruption a breeze, and it takes only seconds to remove the problem at its source. You find the hidden formatting code, delete it with a backspace, and your problem is solved. As far as I know, WordPerfect is the only word processor where you can be 100% sure that your document has absolutely no embedded crap.
Some final comments. I love WordPerfect but I'm no zealot. I'll happily ditch it in two seconds the moment an open source alternative addresses my above comments. I simply can't understand how people can create a word processor that doesn't have a sharp looking, minimal, ultra responsive draft mode. I like the draft mode in ABIword, but I've found that the program isn't as stable as I'd like it to be.
Unfortunately, WordPerfect has some stability issues as well. I've found that in my newest book, which contains 300 or so footnotes, WordPerfect seems to have a memory leak or something which causes a freeze for every ten or so endnotes I edit.
My guess is that in five years or less, open source word processors will have all the main features a serious writer could want. But for now, WordPerfect remains my word processor of choice.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
"OpenOffice is equally as good and costs nothing?" It is not free and it does not do as good a job. First, the time spent learning a new program is lost time. If I spent twenty hours learning open office, that is twenty hours lost and $7,000 less in the bank. Second, there are features in word perfect, some for lawyers, some for engineers, some for other professions that nobody has copied. For example, in my profession, the law, where there are thousand of members, only a handful of us actually go to court. When we do, we have to write a form of term paper we call a brief. Briefs have a very formal style which requires a very arcane table of contents. With WordPerfect I hit one button and it generates a table of contents and table of authorities which meet the nitpicking requirements of the anal rednecks before whom I practice. Word requires two hours of typing by a $25 per hour legal secretary; or four hours of my $350 an hour time. Assuming I had the time to download, install and troubleshoot an open source word processor, it still would not have my beloved "generate" button. WordPerfect does exactly what Word does only cheaper and better and takes less space on my harddrive. Why not pay for a superior product?
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..
As someone that just walked my in-laws through the purchase of a "low-end" Dell, this is how it works. By default the machine comes with WordPerfect (not PerfectOffice). For $11 you could upgrade to MS Works (which is basically MS Word and some crap). The fact that the low-end machine starts at $499 and you get a $25 discount for spending over $500 means that the MS Word "upgrade" is essentially $14 cheaper than the WordPerfect default.
Not to mention the fact that, as you stated, many people opt for the inexpensive MS Office Small business edition.
Basically WordPerfect and PerfectOffice are included as a reminder to Microsoft that Dell is the one making the sale. Dell has no problems going along with Microsoft, but they don't want MS to forget that, when push comes to shove, Dell has other options.
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
...download from their site in zip format:
f ectOffice12_ScreenShots.ZIP
http://www.corel.com/futuretense_cs/ccurl/WordPer
I am NaN
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.
I have always said that if Word continued on its development path by 2015 or 2020 at the latest it will have the functionality that WordPerfect had in 1990.
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
Take a look at the Dell home systems. They've been including it for quite awhile. I bet there are more WordPerfect users than you realize. Wordperfect is a great word processor. If they wouldn't have stumbled during the Win 3.0/3.1 days then the could still own the market. AMI Pro was really the best word processor during those days until ... hmmm... who bought it..Lotus???... IBM owns it now and it is called WordPro.. I Still think that Open office has everything that anyone needs...
Zoid.com
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.
My old elementary school used wordperfect and I have been hooked ever since. I started off with 5.1 and worked my way up with it. Unfortunatly I found that after Version 9.0 it became very unstable. I tried 10 and it would crash at random some times on windows XP. I recently just purchased version 11 hoping it will not crash anymore and I also thought it would be the last word perfect released. Guess I was wrong. Im glad they are still releasing as they make one of the best word processors on the market and not to mention the fact that many doctors and lawyers swear by it. Now if only my university would allow me to submit wpp documents instead of word documents!
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
Since that post probably took 5 minutes to write, it has a value of $29.17. It was very generous to donate it to this discussion. Thanks.
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.
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
Don't blaspheme. Microsoft knows what you need better than you.
There are still a few places to pick it up: try Cal State or Radix's FTP site.
Once you've updated it properly, it runs fine in classic mode, and is pretty zippy. I have to use it periodically because the university I work at monomaniacally standardized on wintel (despite having healthy fine arts, media, and comp sci depts., duh) and many use WP, so us mac users constantly receive official missives attached as a .wpd file. Fortunately, the old mac application opens even new files without choking.
Damn those pesky terrorists
The link is: news://alt.religion.adm3a
alt.RELIGION.OldComputerTerminal?
Do a lot of people post to that newsgroup? Do they worship the landfill god?
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....
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?
The real reason WP is better than Word can be summed up in two words No Clippy.
There's no shame in being a pariah. -Marge Simpson
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 !
Oh, it exists alright - locked in a dimension unseen in eternal combat with the Emacs template.
The world finally ends when a winner emerges. But for about ten minutes beforehand you will receive full enlightenment into the trickest workings of the winning editors avatar/template, so really it's a wash.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
My mother loved Word Perfecct and was an absolute guru at it. Then her work forced her to change to Word.
The result? Support calls to me.
Problem is, she sucks at describing problems. I get phone calls that start with "How do I do Control-Alt-P in Word?"
HP been shipping WordPerfect instead of Office for almost a year now (I have the ad that says that Inlcudes WordPerfect 2003 Standerd on Every Model(. Also, I have one of those key things from WP 5.1, for both 98, and 101-key models :). Now if they would release a mac version, I could forever de-MS my Mac.
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Print Screen was pretty useful when you could only run one program at a time and needed to keep some information for later reference.
Scroll lock came in handy when you had to switch between reading a document, when you wanted arrow keys to scroll and editing it, when they should move the cursor. Try it without mouse sometime.
On the other hand, Help is only marginally useful if a program comes with a full printed manual and a luminated reference card. Do you really have space to spare on a 360K floppy to hold a copy of the book.
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.
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."