Slashdot Mirror
Corel To Test WordPerfect For Linux
prostoalex writes "CNET News says Corel will introduce a native Linux version of its WordPerfect Office product on April 15th . This will be a pilot project, as Corel executives want to find out whether it's worth competing with the other products (namely StarOffice and OpenOffice)." The piece mentions: "Corel previously produced a Linux-native version of WordPerfect 8, released in 1998, and offered a Linux-translated version of WordPerfect 9 in 2000, when Linux was still a cornerstone of the company's broader strategy."
as a Beta Tester for Wordperfect Office 2000. And even the final version it just stank. It seemed to use Wine to emulate most of the program and what didn't work in wine they reprogrammed to work for Linux. So I wouldn't say that WP 2000 was a Native Linux App, It just kinda Ran in it barely. WP 8 on the other hand ran quite well because they ported the Unix version and not the windows version. I liked WP as a word processor much better then Word or Star/Open Office. It seemed to well designed for word processing and it did it well. But the WP 2000 for Linux was to sluggish and looked to much like the windows version to fit into the linux desktop, and it required a lot of junk most linux apps didn't need and made loading on a remote X difficult (Which is what I did a lot in college when I was beta testing it because I like to work on the schools Sun Workstations with the Unix Keyboard and the 19" monitors) so when a good version of Staroffice came out I started using that because it worked well with Linux and Solaris (even though the install was stupid at the time)
What I always found odd was the fact that WP hasn't been ported to the Apple Mac OS X environment. They could probably do some good business because a lot of the time the Apple users only use office is because there is no decent alternative. Appleworks just stinks, OpenOffice is not quite there yet for the mac. WP would be a good more affordable solution on the mac platform as well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Saying that WP files can be read elsewhere because they use XML is like saying one IM program can connect to all others because it uses TCP/IP, or configuration files for one program will work for all other apps because they're plain ASCII.
XML, by itself, is not a format, people!
Then Corel got ahold of it, and the added feature sets were late in coming but full of promise, but the damn program just never worked. We got accidentally on some kind of instant-updates-at-all-costs program, maybe because I was vocal on Compuserve at the time, so I can't fault Corel on the number of update CDs we received each month. But the thing just didn't work.
Our word processor was WordPerfect. It was wonderful around 5.1. I beta-tested its Postscript drivers and this was in the days when the Apple rep ran away because he couldn't believe a Laserwriter was being driven by a PC through the serial port. We loved WP. Then Corel got ahold of it, and we had to move on to a product that, well, actually worked most of the time. So we went to Word, but it was a struggle because everyone tried to use WP secretly. What's wrong with a "Reveal Codes" option? Nothing. Why doesn't Word have one? Because the people who design it don't use it for creating pretty language. But we simply couldn't keep using WP, because it broke enough files to affect our ability to perform as a publishing house.
We also used Xara, which was cheap and powerful. Bugger me, Corel got ahold of that, too, and killed it.
Corel's the sort of company that one would love to support as a kind of perpetual underdog, but the reality is that there's been something perpetually wrong with their development cycle: stuff just gets buggier, and buggier, and buggier until it's too frustrating to use.
I'm sure there's room for a Wordperfect-like product, but it's a real shame Corel is the vehicle to provide it.
If it's a decent, usable port (ie, printing and fonts don't require a PhD to set up), and doesn't have a myriad of libc-version-compatibility problems (something that people seem to ignore, but is a valid, serious issue with distributing software for Linux), then I will be one of the first in line to buy WP/Linux. I started with my thesis on WP5.1 for VMS and for DOS. I used 6 for DOS professionally, and skipped the first few Windows versions.
8 for Linux was a bit awkward but it worked, reliably, and I enjoyed it until suddenly it wouldn't work anymore because of my libc version. 2000, well, I really liked the consistency of the Linux and Windows versions; however, printing was difficult and reliability was awful (most crashes were font-related, though, and I blame Wine for many of them).
Another post asks "Why WP when OpenOffice is out there?" You might also ask "Why OO when Word is out there?" or "Why Gnome when there's KDE?" or even "Why Linux when we have Windows?" It's about choice. Some people, myself included, dislike OO immensely. Why? Because it imitates Word, both the UI and the underlying structure of how it formats documents. I've hated Word and its imitators since the DOS version.
I'm not going to argue about whether or not Reveal Codes is philosophically correct or not. *I* like it. *I* am the consumer, and it's what I prefer to use. I hope it's successful; right now I use VMware to run the Windows version, but would much prefer to run natively.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
"Make it fit." Many an undergraduate's paper has been stretched from seven to ten pages with that little gem, and it's so much more visually innocuous than the standard tack of big chunky margins and 14-point font.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
The Mac desktop market dwarfs Linux the same way that the Windows market dwarfs it.
Actually, No. In terms of sales, both Mac and Linux desktops are each 3-4% of the desktop market. Sales is not a good measure of Linux though, as its freely distributable. Also, a considerable number of desktop systems are purchased as Windows and then have Linux installed, so the Linux could well be at least a few percent higher. Incidentally, this implies that MS Windows sales don't correspond to use.
Two years ago I would have been jumping up and down over this. I was a WP user for a long time and really wanted a good version for Linux. But it's too late now and it's going to cost too much for Linux users (on the whole). I might still need it a little bit, just to translate all of my WP files into something that OpenOffice can read, but I wouldn't do any new work in it. Here's why:
OpenOffice just released 1.1.1. They will likely release 2.0 sometime this year. Meanwhile, users of closed software will wait for fixes. I've gotten used to Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice, and a host of other programs that are released much more often than anything in the closed source world.
Beyond that, I've gotten used to not paying for these products. I'll give back in other ways (including donating money to support, just the same way that I support Public Radio), but I won't pay over $100 (US) for software any more. It doesn't fit my budget, it doesn't fit my view of how things should work.
All that said, were I still working at my old school which was a Mac shop, I would buy WP for Mac in a heartbeat. That they aren't developing for Mac baffles me. That's where commercial software ought to focus when they're looking for something other than Windows.
WP had a great run. the 5.1 version was insanely great. But the time for WP is likely past.
Now, if someone would implement the Reveal Codes feature in OpenOffice, every WP user could switch and I could be completely happy with OpenOffice.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
I used and loved WP on Unix from 5.1 through 8. I still have WP6 and WP8 on one of my Linux boxes to manage the occassional old document.
WP's user interface had clunky spots, but it was *predictable*. StarOffice drives me crazy in a few places-- Getting rid of extra lines at the top of the page sometimes seems impossible, and Good Luck if you have a table at the top of a page and want to insert lines above it.
But WP's most impressive feat was the file compatability. From 5.2 onward, files were forward- AND backward-compatible. The tagged-block structure file format had been thought out well, and as new features were introduced, they were added to the format in such a way that older versions of the app could open and use as much of the newer files as possible. Compared to Word, it stood out as just plain Good Engineering.