WordPerfect could kill Bill

[jimmythewriter]

Linux keeps trying to go mainstream. WordPerfect struggles to hold its market share. I don't see why the two efforts can't work together.

If Linux had a world-class office suite, Microsoft could kiss their desktop dominance goodbye. I'd switch to Linux in a heartbeat if, in doing so, I didn't have to give up WordPerfect. Others, I'm sure, feel the same way. Many of those who think they can't live without Mr. Bill's abortion (He calls it "Word," I believe) would change their minds if they could go to Linux with a stable version of WordPerfect on the desktop.

Many Linux users tout OpenOffice. They must be people, for the most part, who never place any serious stress on a word processor. Those of us who use these contraptions professionally, however, can no more live with OO than we can fly to the moon trailing clouds of glory. OO is, to put it bluntly, a clunky piece of crap, and Star Office isn't appreciably better.

Anyone who doesn't agree should try running a merge or formatting labels in OO. If they've got any hair left after they've done pulling it out, they can try the same task in WordPerfect and find that hair-pulling isn't necessary. And it's not a case of many such tasks being easier because I'm "used to" WordPerfect; instead it's the case that OpenOffice and Star Office simply lack the power to do a great many things that WordPerfect does gracefully, and with ease. In fact, OO and SO can't even perform as well as Mr. Bill's abortion, which, for its part, can't go head-to-head with WordPerfect either.

I heard a rumor that some outfit in San Francisco is working on a WordPerfect/Linux port. I hope to Christ the rumor is true because I simply cannot afford to buy Vista (what is it now? $600 the copy for premium?) or MS Office (saw it today at $700 the copy for a top-flight version).

Thus I'm stuck running a dual-boot system. I've got XP on the "C" drive and Kubuntu on the other. I'll be stuck there forever unless I can get WP to run on Kubuntu, which, at this moment, isn't going to work. I can't go to OO or SO because some sacrifices are just too great. I can't even upgrade to a 64-bit Windows system because I can't afford the OS.

I'd like to hear from others on this one.

[Zelmo]

I agree with you almost to the letter. I spent a lot of time trying to get WordPerfect running in Linux. In the end, I just use OOo, since I don't have very demanding requirements. But I recently noticed its deficiency with labels, like you said, when I tried to make some at home. It's not nearly as solid as MS Word (which I use at work) in that respect, which itself is a far cry from WP. And at work I pull my hair out several times a year because of inexplicable things Word does to documents. I really miss the granularity of control WP offers through its Reveal Codes feature, which not only lets you see exactly what's going on in the background, but let you manipulate every bit of it.

Corel did release a couple of versions of WP for Linux in the late '90s (versions 8 and 9), about the same time they released their own Linux distro. But they were having serious financial trouble, and rather than sell off or open-source WP, they gave in to an offer by Microsoft to kill all their Linux operations in exchange for a cash bailout. Xandros picked up their Linux distro (which is said to be one of the easiest to use), but the only way to find WP for Linux is to buy an old copy of Corel Linux on e-Bay. You pretty much have to run it on an old distro, because it uses obsolete libraries. And even if you get it, it's not as feature-comprehensive as the Windows releases.

There's little chance of Corel open-sourcing WordPerfect any time soon, since the US Department of Justice keeps renewing their contract with Corel for licenses of WP, so there's a pretty reliable revenue stream. So if it's true that someone's going to port or even clone it, that's wonderful!

[Vergil83]

As someone who has never used word perfect, two questions.
1) What makes it so much better than openoffice (or abiword/koffice for that matter)? I agree that OOo isn't as good as everyone says (I used gedit/latex).....
2) Does it have pefect .doc reading/writing?

[jimmythewriter]

or MS Word, you've simply never used a professional word processor. Nothing else compares.

I'm sure WordPerfect handles .doc files perfectly. The sell-outs who now manage Corel Corp have gone to a lot of trouble to make WordPerfect 100 percent compatible with Mr. Bill's abortion, a fact which I believe had something to do with the $50 million MS invested in non-voting shares of Corel shortly before Corel announced its decision to abandon Linux.

Zelmo is right. Somebody ought to clone WordPerfect on Linux. I volunteer to write the documentation. Let's get started.

[Vergil83]

The problem with cloning is it won't have the perfect .doc ability.

I have used MS Word (who hasn't) and I have never been impressed. I was just wondering what made Wordperfect such a great program compared to OOo (or Word for that matter). Is it easier to use? Do it not change look from computer to computer. A logical coherence of toolbars? Human readable file types? Decent (non crap) graphs?

[jimmythewriter]

you mean compatibility with MS word, how do you know it won't have that? We haven't written it yet.

As far as will it do this or that, are the menus rational, etc., refer to the name: WordPERFECT. There's nothing you can think to do with formatting text documents that WordPerfect cannot do. It handles graphics easily. It'll handle files as big as you care to make them. As to ease of use, did I not say that it's elegant? I wasn't talking about the way it looks. I was talking about the way it works, ease of use, etc.

Yes: WordPerfect looked and worked slightly different on the Mac (when last I used a Mac in, ummm, 199, so there was a bit of a learning curve there, but you couldn't say the transition was difficult unless you're the type who pole-vaults over mouse turds. I've never seen WordPerfect's GUI on any other platform, though I did once use WP 5.1 for DOS running on OS-2. It worked just like WP 5.1 for DOS, which, if you're an office secretary, has never really been improved upon. WP 5.1 for DOS was as near to a perfect tool for typists (not to say publicists) as anyone has ever got.

If you're one of those who can type 90-100 wpm+, WP 5.1 is a dream because everything is on the keyboard, so you never have to use a mouse. GUI interfaces are an improvement only insofar as WYSIWYG. 5.1 for DOS didn't have that capability. And believe me: there are plenty of stenos out there who learned word processing back in the early eighties and won't, therefore, give up WP 5.1.

WP 5.1 had some stiff competition, though: Does anybody here know the story of WordStar?

[burntfuse]

I haven't used WordPerfect, but I agree about OpenOffice. While it's definitely better than nothing, it seems slow and bloated (IMO partly because it reinvents half of its functions instead of using some standard libraries), has a not-very-good interface, and altogether just feels to me like a ripoff of MS Office with many of its faults. I'd really like to see something different for office programs on Linux.

[techieMoe]

Well, I actually owned WordPerfect for Linux a few years ago, and I saw nothing life-changing about it. I don't see how it's going to be a silver bullet any more than OpenOffice.org was.

[jimmythewriter]

and not only didn't I see anything life-changing about it, it was so bad that I got pissed off and burnt it. It wasn't a finished product. It was a good idea that Corel half-baked before turning it loose on the Linux community. They didn't even have enough sense to leave it in circulation and let the community develop it for them. They killed it almost before it was born.

The WINE thing that came later was a loser from the get-go. In fact, the whole WINE project is a loser, mostly because it's a bad idea -- but I don't want to go there. My point is just that WordPerfect on Linux was never really WordPerfect at all because it was so badly flawed in so many ways. It wasn't even what I'd call an Alpha release. It was just for ****. I think the fact that so many of those who tried WP Linux actually liked it is a testament to how ****** word processing on Linux actually is.

Don't go by your experience with that WP Linux abortion. Get next to a Windoze machine running WP 2000 or better. I've got WP 12 on mine. Then you'll see what the Linux version was missing. You'll see how badly flawed it was. You'll see what WP Linux ought to look and feel like.

I've been at word processing for a mighty long time. I started with IBM Display Write 3 and, when I moved to WordPerfect 4.2, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. WP 5.1 WAS heaven in the DOS days. When I left DOS, I was running WP 6.0-b (which had serious flaws). I moved to Windoze with WP 7.0. Since then I've had versions 8, 9, 10, and 12. Version 13 (X3) is the current version. I'm waiting for X3 to add ODF support before I go there (and I hear it will happen this year).

I don't know if I'll go beyond that, though, because I can't afford Windoze Vista, and I don't yet know if the next WP will run on 32-bit hardware.

[Vergil83]

you mean compatibility with MS word, how do you know it won't have that? We haven't written it yet.

Well despite all the work that OOo has done, they don't have perfect .doc ability (I am sure sun has spent some $ trying), so I don't see why some wordperfect clone would even better.