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posted by martyb on Monday October 29 2018, @06:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the Reveal-Codes dept.

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.)


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Monday October 29 2018, @07:08AM (9 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Monday October 29 2018, @07:08AM (#754941) Journal
    No?

    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?
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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday October 29 2018, @07:42AM (4 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Monday October 29 2018, @07:42AM (#754948)

    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)

      by drussell (2678) on Monday October 29 2018, @10:36AM (#755003) Journal

      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)

        by drussell (2678) on Monday October 29 2018, @10:38AM (#755006) Journal

        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)

          by RS3 (6367) on Monday October 29 2018, @02:46PM (#755114)

          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

            by Arik (4543) on Monday October 29 2018, @10:35PM (#755392) Journal
            Just FYI, it's a myth that using WINE libraries causes a slow down, or for that matter that simply running windows binaries through WINE causes a slowdown either. Wine is not an emulator, or a vm, it's better to think of it as a port of the Win32 subsystem to X. There's no 'translation overhead' because there's no translation. I've actually seen the *reverse* on occasion - many programs seem to run a bit faster under WINE than they do after a reboot and running native on the same hardware.
            --
            If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 29 2018, @07:43AM (3 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 29 2018, @07:43AM (#754950) Journal

    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)

      by drussell (2678) on Monday October 29 2018, @10:40AM (#755009) Journal

      WordPerfect 19 is the current version for Windows, not 9.

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 29 2018, @11:11AM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 29 2018, @11:11AM (#755027) Journal

        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

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @03:51PM (#755147)

        WordPerfect 19 is the current version for Windows, not 9.

        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.)