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WordPerfect for DOS: The Program That Refuses to Die

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

Appalbarry writes:

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: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Monday October 29 2018, @08:47AM

    by zocalo (302) on Monday October 29 2018, @08:47AM (#754971)
    To digress briefly, I started with v4.2 as well, using another of its strengths - cross platform support; I was using it on DOS and at least three UNIX flavours concurrently. IIRC, the DOS version was still written almost entirely in assembly at that point, although 5.1 was probably the release most people would say was WordPerfect's pinnacle. Happy times, or at least as happy as you can get when dealing with something like a word processor.

    Back to Reveal Codes though, and sure, you could mess up the document with mis-matched or mis-aligned tags (and what word processor doesn't let you get into that state?), but I actually found them to be incredibly useful for understanding exactly what was going on with more elaborate formatting. Keep in mind that many people were basically doing low-end DTP of technical documents in WordPerfect rather than learn Latex or splash out for something like FrameMaker, making it invaluable if you were creating document templates, or more complicated reports that spanned several separate documents. What I really liked was that the codes were displayed in such a self-explanatory manner, including most of the more obscure ones, making it very easy to understand what was going on with the document, which is more than can be said for many other text markup languages I could mention. Given the number of strange fsck-ups that you get with MS Word's markup (seriously, WTF do you need to sacrifice to create a working Word Template that doesn't break if you squint at it wrong?) I almost wish Microsoft would implement Reveal Codes in Word almost exactly as WordPerfect 5.1 did it. Obviously I'd prefer it if they just fixed creation of the damn templates in the first place, but that seems somewhat unlikely at this point...
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    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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