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A recent Guardian article encouraging writers to abandon MS Word included a comment from a reader that read:
With 70+ books under my belt, I'm still using WordPerfect 5.1. Luckily there's an excellent website offering free software to enable one to use this DOS software with Windows 10: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/
If you follow that link you'll find a treasure trove of tools and advice that will help you run WordPerfect 5.1 on any Windows system, as well as Macs and Linux boxes. The author does note that it's much easier on 32 bit systems than 64 bit, but it can be done on either. There's even advice on making printers work.
(Of late I've been using the generally excellent FocusWriter full screen editor for distraction free writing, but if I can get WP 5.1 working....) (And, just for the record, Corel still sells Wordperfect Office.)
(Score: 2, Informative) by c0lo on Monday October 29 2018, @06:37AM (15 children)
So? Not on Linux, can't be bothered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Monday October 29 2018, @07:08AM (9 children)
I'm surprised. I doubt they've updated it much since the version that was available for Linux.
Of course, it was a binary blob, not real software, so you would have to run it in a vm; but then again you have to do that for an up to date web browser today so who would even notice? IIRC the Office for Linux actually ran with WINE libraries anyway.
Seriously, they won't even take your money for it anymore? Are you sure?
https://www.amazon.com/COREL-WORDPERFECT-FOR-LINUX-PERSONAL/dp/B000WD449S
http://linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/taxonomy.html
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday October 29 2018, @07:42AM (4 children)
Thanks for reminding me- I have it somewhere. It seems like a very long time ago. I remember it ran in its own Wine environment. It was cool that Corel made it for Linux but I remember feeling like it was cheating, but I'm sure they would never have sold enough to recover their development costs for a full Linux port.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Monday October 29 2018, @10:36AM (3 children)
There was a "Wordperfect 9" for Linux but it was a complete re-write from a third party, authorized by Corel, rather than a port of the Windows version. I still have a copy somewhere on some old machines. It was free, you just had to register and get a serial number code at install time. It was actually pretty good for a complete third-party implementation but it was missing some features and had some bugs. It seems to me it did include it's own printer subsystem, though it was not compatible with 5.1 style printer definitions, IIRC.
Oh, the fun of making printer defs. :) I wrote a few of those from scratch back in the day... :)
I started using WP with 4.1, then 4.2, 5.1... (I still have original manuals for 5.1, Library 5.1, Dataperfect 2, etc, also...) I also have most of the older Windows versions, at least 5.2, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11 and I think a copy of 12 somewhere.
The current version is 19 but I see no need since 5.1 and 10/11 fit all my current needs. :)
(Score: 2) by drussell on Monday October 29 2018, @10:38AM (2 children)
On second thought, I think I was wrong... It was 8 for Linux, right around the time that 9 for Windows came out.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday October 29 2018, @02:46PM (1 child)
Similar experience for me too. I'll have to dig up my Linux Corel WP. 8 sounds about right. I'll comment sometime later if I find it. My memory is that it felt very slow, which is no surprise given the Wine library call layers. But in those days I felt most things X-windows were slow no matter how much tuning I did, and that was probably pre-xorg stuff.
For the record, I mostly use WP 12 on Windows- it came with many Dell computers and I love it. It exports / publishes to many formats, and when needed I fire up LibreOffice to export to stupid docx.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday October 29 2018, @10:35PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 29 2018, @07:43AM (3 children)
WP8, not the latest on sale (9)
WP8 unsupported on more recent releases, YMMV
see here [reddit.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by drussell on Monday October 29 2018, @10:40AM (2 children)
WordPerfect 19 is the current version for Windows, not 9.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 29 2018, @11:11AM
Eh, what's one 1 between friends?
In any case, there's no recent WP version on Linux.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @03:51PM
WordPerfect X9 is the current version, not 19.
Corel, like Microsoft, is sufficiently triskaidekaphobic that they didn't release a version 13. Where Microsoft jumped from Office 12 (2007) to Office 14 (2010) in their superstitious efforts to avoid the number 13, Corel switched to X numbers after version 12, giving us WordPerfect X3 through X9. (In theory it's a bastardized mashup of Roman and Arabic numbering, but we won't know that for sure until the next release. If it's X10, then it's just X-prefixed numbering. If it's something like XX0 then it's a hybrid mess.)
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 29 2018, @07:52AM (2 children)
For those who don't want to go to the trouble of installing FocusWriter just for this, here's a quick tutorial on how to get the same thing using a common word processor, let's say Word:
You're welcome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @08:44AM
Alt-F11 does it for me :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @05:52PM
Windows will still interrupt and ask to install the new update ...
(Score: 2) by dw861 on Tuesday October 30 2018, @03:20AM (1 child)
I love this word processor and run several flavours of WordPerfect on Linux:
"WordPerfect for Linux" 8.1 runs on 32-bit Debian distros (as well as several others). As a native Linux application, it does not use WINE. For more info consult Peter Stone's excellent page:
http://xwp8users.com/ [xwp8users.com]
I'm presently running PC WordPefect X6 inside a Windows XP virtual machine. This is the setup I'm using for my current writing project.
And, as I have a very large archive of research projects from the 1990s, I also use WordPerfect for Macintosh inside the Sheepshaver Mac OS 9 emulator. You can find a large community of other people who also do this at:
https://groups.io/g/wordperfectmac [groups.io] The "Mac appliance" that they have built over the years for use under OS X is quite impressive. I had to create my own setup for Linux.
All this said, I might consider making a slow move over to Typora if there were a way to number pages.
https://typora.io/ [typora.io]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday October 30 2018, @04:23AM
Sigh.
In the context of "Corel still sells Wordperfect Office" I'm saying: whatever they are selling now does not runs on Linux, so I'm not interested to buy or to use what are they selling now
Full of redundant repetitions as it may be, I hope I made myself clear enough this time: I'm not saying that version 8 does not run on a Linux properly setup for the purpose, nor that WP8 is useless when run in Linux or any other platform.
Let me say it the third time (to make it true [poetryfoundation.org]): I am not interested in what Corel sells now as WordPerfect because this version does not run on Linux.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford