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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: 2, Informative) by MuadDib on Monday October 29 2018, @08:49AM (5 children)

    by MuadDib (4439) on Monday October 29 2018, @08:49AM (#754972)

    Latex anyone??? Much clearer ad all codes are plain ASCII.

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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday October 29 2018, @03:32PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Monday October 29 2018, @03:32PM (#755141)

    Latex anyone??? Much clearer ad all codes are plain ASCII.

    Unless you're into necrophilia, I strongly suggest LuaTeX and using UTF8 sources with LuaLaTeX packages.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Monday October 29 2018, @07:31PM (2 children)

    by edIII (791) on Monday October 29 2018, @07:31PM (#755294)

    No. My personal alternative to LaTeX (la-tech), is to viciously beat the head of my penis with a ball-peen hammer for 15 minutes. That's not a word processing program in any sense of the word, but a medieval torture device.

    LaTeX is something that some scientists need to learn because their documents are too complicated to write in M$ Word, because word processors don't support mathematical equations and symbols very well. Then they get converted to PDF for the rest of the world.

    Seriously. CSS and cross-browser identical presentations are easier to pull off than writing a technical document in LaTeX.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @07:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @07:59AM (#755537)

      Disagree. I took notes in math and CS and could only do so either freehand with later transcription, or in raw LaTeX, which also needed a pass afterwards for spare and missing slashes and sanity checking brackets etc. Every other digital input method I tried failed, including 'e-ink' since the degree of resolution was worse than my freehand ink and pencil, and it turns out a little e and a little 3 are very different things, and are much much easier to discern when not the same cluster of roughly 5x8 pixels.

    • (Score: 2) by drussell on Tuesday October 30 2018, @01:18PM

      by drussell (2678) on Tuesday October 30 2018, @01:18PM (#755616) Journal

      LaTeX is something that some scientists need to learn because their documents are too complicated to write in M$ Word, because word processors don't support mathematical equations and symbols very well. Then they get converted to PDF for the rest of the world.

      WordPerfect 5.1 has an equation editor in it, with graphical preview even. :)

      It worked quite well, actually. It sure made my school math, chemistry and physics papers look a lot more polished than pretty much anyone else in the class back then... :)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @08:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @08:24PM (#755331)

    Except it is more of a programming language rather than markup…