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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: 1, Disagree) by canopic jug on Monday October 29 2018, @09:15AM (5 children)
Oh, many loved being able to dig around in the codes to correct markup in WordPerfect. However, time spend dorking with markup was not time spend on the task at hand. In other words it was an unproductive waste of time and resources. Writing is a creative task for the most part and the number of hours or minutes that the average person has at work that overlap with the hours or minues they are productive in creative work are quite small. Spending that time on fixing markup that should never have broken in the first place is just a waste. If WordPerfect never messed up its own markup then I would have had few complaints about it.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nuke on Monday October 29 2018, @07:53PM
The advantage of revealing codes (ie the markup) was to undo the mess that the user themselves might have created in the process of arranging the format and then perhaps re-arranging because the boss demanded a different layout. It was not to have fun examining the markup, as you seem to assume.
After using WP for a few years, my company changed to Word (it became an all MS shop) so I got a direct comparison. It seemed that Word, which could not reveal codes, just piled more and more markup on top of previous no-longer-wanted markup until the format of the document was in such an irretrievable mess that sometimes I just ditched the whole thing and started over again. What was that you said about wasting time? You knew that the markup in Word was like a hidden nest of snakes that you wanted to flush out but were prevented. Word looked prettier on the surface though.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Monday October 29 2018, @11:26PM (1 child)
You mean like when I'm trying to edit a numbered list in Word and it randomly scrambles fonts/bold, etc? This shit drives me insane. I usually wind up having to completely re-type it as copy/paste keeps the scrambled fonts and "paste special" doesn't even help. I usually write technical docs with the default fonts for the numbered lists and terminal fonts for examples or screenshots in between. Word always fucks this up. Usually I spend more time trying to get it to not look fucked up than I do actually writing it. Give me my reveal codes!!!!
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(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 30 2018, @06:45AM
I wouldn't know what M$ Word does to its documents but judging from the overall quality of the company's products I would expect many bad things from it, too, far more that the occasional troubles that WordPerfect makes. However, WordPerfect and M$ Word are not the only choices. Try upgrading to LibreOffice or Calligra [calligra.org] instead. They're both far better. Calligra is a little different though. If I were starting new I'd use that but LibreOffice is a little more similar to the mainstream word processors going back to WordStar.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 30 2018, @07:27PM (1 child)
So given the choice between
Product A screws up its formatting, but you can drop to basic mode to fix it manually, and
Product B screws up its formatting, but you can't fix it so you're just SOL,
you're going to criticize Product A for the screwing-up in the first place?
Damn.
*facepalm*
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday October 31 2018, @04:32AM
The direct competitor to WordPerfect 4.2 was M$ Word for DOS which was not that bad, for an M$ product. M$ Word for Windows sucked and, from all indications, continues to suck.
So if you are in a position to choose among word processors, just use LibreOffice or Calligra then. If you are not in a position to choose, then so what? geez.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.