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I had no idea dosemu2 could translate VGA to S-Lang. That's very nice, and I will look into it. WordPerfect was a great word processor, I remember using versio
by apricot 6y ago
I had no idea dosemu2 could translate VGA to S-Lang. That's very nice, and I will look into it.
WordPerfect was a great word processor, I remember using version 5.1 for years because it was wicked fast, rock stable, and most importantly, it was predictable. By contrast, MS Word -- even today -- seems to have a mind of its own. You move an image, and suddenly all your numbered bullet points appear in a different font except for the last one, and nothing short of retyping the whole thing in another document seems to fix it.
- D13Fd 6y agoHave you actually used the GUI version of WordPerfect? I was forced to use it heavily for a year of pure writing for a previous job. It's incredibly unpredictable. It's like whack-a-mole. You make text in one place bold, and all the sudden some of your footnote text on a different page becomes bold. The people at that job who were really good knew all of the tricks, digging into the codes that WordPerfect inserts to address various issues. But even then, it was an extra step, and I never became as productive in WordPerfect as I had been in Word. Plus WordPerfect has been on maintenance mode with Corel for decades at this point, catching lots of bugs and half-implemented features.
- apricot 6y agoThe only version of WordPerfect I ever used was 5.1 for MS-DOS, and my comments apply to that one only. I heard the GUI version left a lot to be desired, so I never upgraded.
- tambourine_man 6y ago5.1 was the magic version of word processors. Word 5.1 on the Mac was amazing. Fast, powerful, probably everything one would need even today, aside from track changes.
- asveikau 6y agoI am having flashbacks to late 90s Linux. One of the distros back then was Caldera OpenLinux. It had a Linux port of WordPerfect. It got a lot of criticism at the time for being nonfree.
- woofie11 6y agoThe port was so perfect! Not the Corel ones, but the one from SD Corp. I'd love to have that running again.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoCan it be run on modern Linux?
- asveikau 6y agoI looked into it just now. Somebody has WordPerfect 8 binaries around. It requires libc5 - the c library that was common before glibc became common at the end of the 90s. And then needs X libraries that are compiled against libc5. Probably you could find an old Red Hat 5 or something and pull out those libraries to run on a recent kernel.
- compsciphd 6y agofor everyone that bitches about docker and ubuntu snaps, this is a perfect application of them
- ptman 6y agoI wonder if libc5 is so old that it has problems with docker. But I remember loki games being statically linked to avoid problems with dependencies. You only needed like linux syscalls and X11 for them to work.
- compsciphd 6y ago
- flomo 6y agoReplying to say you are correct and GUI/Windows WordPerfect was completely 100% broken when dealing with 'closing tags'. Some people knew & liked to use the codes, but the basic GUI editing was just defective and caused your formatting to spill out randomly. (at least in vs 5 & 6) Obviously I get this with HTML, but the Mac & MS Word approach of 'object oriented formatting' was just a much better execution for mouse operation.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> You make text in one place bold, and all the sudden some of your footnote text on a different page becomes bold. Tbqh, this is my experience in just about every rich text editor. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but I’ll always bold a word, and then while editing I have to go back and change the word after it, and it will suddenly be bold. I wish bold/italics/etc acted like caps lock. It’s either on or it’s off, and the computer doesn’t try to guess for me.
- geocar 6y ago> I wish bold/italics/etc acted like caps lock. It’s either on or it’s off, and the computer doesn’t try to guess for me. It's starting. Outlook is doing some kind of "autocapitalisation" to me and I have no idea how to turn it off.
- hibbelig 6y agoOutlook has a setting to automatically capitalize the beginnings of sentences. I turned that off. But it's been long ago, I forgot where that setting is. But I recall it was near the setting that enables smart quotes.
- lokedhs 6y agoThey even do it on the web version of Outlook. The setting to change it is 4 levels deep and two of the options are at the bottom of lists and labelled "more options".
- tambourine_man 6y agoThat’s a problem that no WYSIWYG has been able to solve yet. It’s probably an unavoidable abstraction leakage. Hence the unbelievable popularity of markdown. Imagine telling your 90s self your current machine configuration and how awesome it is. Then explain that we, with all this tech, voluntarily chose to type in plaintext format, with notations that kind of work as a more readable form of markup language, because we got fed up trying to make WYSIWYG work. Oh yes, and GUIs are for noobs, pros use terminal emulators, but that’s another topic :)
- Lio 6y agoMy 90s self had already been using GUIs since the 80s courtesy of systems like Acorn RiscOS, Amiga, MacOS and even Windows 2. The thing is I still enjoyed using quality DOS and Unix terminal software. GUIs are not the one true way to represent a UI. They’re not even new technology any more. They’re just different and better suited to certain tasks but not others. It’s like asking why are we still using steering wheels to drive instead of speech recognition?
- projektfu 6y agoFrameMaker had this stuff figured out.
- tambourine_man 6y agoYou don’t deal with PostScript directly. PostScript is akin to assembly.