On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 9:17 PM, Kaplan <[email protected]> wrote: > From:
> However, the last dated entry I can find is Date Updated: 12/23/2009 and I > believe Corel dropped Linux support. I could be wrong. They definitely dropped it in May, 2001. I used to own and operate WordPerfect Universe, http://www.wpuniverse.com> and closely followed relevant events. The last release was WordPerfect Office 9 for Linux, which ran under Wine. But it shipped with a couple of show-stopper bugs that were never repaired. It's far better to run WordPerfect 8 for Linux, which had maintenance patches (plus two updated versions that included the patches) and run natively. There are lots of sites on the Web where you can get the free version of WP 8 for Linux, which comes with only a few fonts (sites are listed in the WordPerfect For Linux FAQ). The paid version that shipped on a CD is harder to find; it came with 130 fonts. It's somewhat tricky to make more fonts available to the free version. Just for starters, you have to find Type 1 fonts. (Roughly a thousand of them ship with WordPerfect Office for Windows). Another alternative is to run one of the older DOS versions on a virtual DOS machine, which is what I do. For my money, WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS is the best off-the-shelf word processor ever developed. It's all been downhill since then. > Better yet, try OpenOffice. It is completely stable, runs on Linux, FreeBSD, > Max OS X, and it even runs on the Wondoze XP clones at LCC (if you sneak in > with it on PortableApps on your flash device). I keep a copy of OOo installed for those occasions when I must deal with an .odt or .doc file. But the program is a piece of crap when it comes to creating complex documents. It's in the tradition of MS Word, easy to do things their way, but sheer Hell if you need to do something else. E.g., a half-dozen OOoWriter experts and I spent some two weeks trying to create a template for a basic legal document with double-spaced line-numbering and vertical rules outside each margin that bleed to the page's top and bottom. We finally gave up because we couldn't get the vertical rules to bleed to the bottom. Example of complexity involved with OOoWriter: To get as far as we did required two frames inside a footer (so it would replicate on every page), with a table in the left frame to store the line numbers and provide the left vertical rule and a table in the right frame to provide the right vertical rule. But no way we could find to break past the bottom margin for the vertical rules without trashing the bottom margin for the page's content and the other footer's positioning (footer for page number and document title). And it was devilish to work on because you could not see the markup or markup tokens while working. That forced writing down each step of everything we tried, so we could try variants. Same task in WordPerfect: Under 5 minutes using the watermark feature (no frames needed), but under 15 seconds if you use the "pleading" script that ships with the program for the purpose. Bottom line: OOoWriter and MS Word are fine for short memos and letters, but if you want to go beyond that, you'll quickly hit limits and/or bugs unless they come with a template for the document type you need. They're simply not designed for creating complex documents. (To boot, MS Word is notorious for bugs and corruption of large documents. See e.g., my Y2k study of bugs in the Word footnote and endnote features. <http://www.llrx.com/features/word.htm>.) I can't expect someone who's never used WordPerfect to understand, but the ability to view and manipulate the tokenized markup makes all the difference in the world when creating or editing complex documents. Plus you can immediately get the relevant settings dialog simply by double-clicking on a markup token. As Ross Kodner often says, "friends don't let friends process words without Reveal Codes." It's a tragedy that the StarOffice GmBH developers chose to mimic the design and behavior of the least capable major word processor on the market, MS Word. FOSS would be in a lot better position had they chosen instead to embrace and extend the best of all existing word processors. My 2 cents. :-) Best regards, Paul _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
