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I worked in law offices and data entry in the early 90's through high school, and some college. When HTML came along, it was pretty much the same style of synt
by snapetom 4y ago
I worked in law offices and data entry in the early 90's through high school, and some college. When HTML came along, it was pretty much the same style of syntaxing as WP, so it was extremely easy to pick up. I was one of the early HTMLers, helping my school departments. This led me down the road to software engineering.
There are several fortuitous milestones in my career. Working with WP was probably the first major one.
- eterps 4y agoReveal codes [1] was such a useful feature, I really miss it in 'modern' word processing apps. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes
- bombcar 4y agoWord has "show formatting" which .... is a very poor substitute but can sometimes help. I find Word becomes much more manageable if you religiously use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting.
- pimlottc 4y ago> I find Word becomes much more manageable if you religiously use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting. I agree with this tip but it requires very rigorous discipline and is basically impossible to maintain if you're working with any collaborators.
- actually_a_dog 4y agoAgreed. At that point, LaTeX not only all but requires you to use styles, .tex files are text-based for easy version control. I wouldn't necessarily say I'd endorse LaTeX for collaboration per se among people who don't normally use it, but I think it points the way toward what a good collaborative writing tool would look like.
- bombcar 4y agoFor all of its faults "GitHub markdown" works decently well for collaborative writing; the number of people who are willing to learn LaTeX just to work on a document is way too small compared to the number who would greatly have their life made easier by doing so.
- actually_a_dog 4y agoAgain, agreed on all counts. Unfortunately, however, while Markdown (any flavor you choose) is pretty great for writing text, it's really limited in the types of formatting you can do, hence also the types of documents you can create. That leads you down one of two routes: 1. Massively extend Markdown so it can do a large-ish subset of what LaTeX can do, or 2. Slightly extend Markdown so it can do enough to be useful, but nowhere near what LaTeX can. I don't see a great way to do option 1 without making something that's nearly as complex as LaTeX. Option 2 doesn't seem all that great to me, except maybe as a gateway drug to LaTeX. Maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong here, but it seems like Markdown itself sits at or near some local optimum of complexity vs utility that's pretty strongly attracting in the sense that going too far away from that point makes you lose the thing that makes Markdown attractive in the first place.
- themadturk 4y agoI worked for law firm in the mid-90s who developed a robust set of Word styles that were pretty much required internally and made for nice, consistent documents (and could even be applied pretty well to documents from the outside). Now I work for people who work heavily with Word and wouldn't know a style if it bit them in the ass.
- bombcar 4y agoThe best are when people are working in the blown-out remains of something that was once a wonderfully-styled and designed document (if you know what ALT-F9 does, you know the type). I've spent hours moving over the info into a clean template; it's not worth fighting the blown-out version.
- snapetom 4y agoEven WP didn't really get Reveal Codes on their own program right when they went to Windows. That tool is just way more appropriate for monospaced terminals instead of WYSIWYG.
- philistine 4y agoThe thing is you cannot force everything in your document to be a style. An errant misstyled element can mess your whole document. I stick to Pages and XeTeX.
- tomjen3 4y agoProtect document-> limit to a selection of styles.
- amelius 4y agoIt's basically the browser's developer's DOM view before it existed.
- chasil 4y agoJust in case anybody forgot, there is a free version of Wordperfect for Linux (non-commercial use only). https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/80768.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/80768.html
- indigodaddy 4y agoI’m guessing WP8 isn’t going to be able to open modernish doc files and certainly not docx? Or might it?
- bombcar 4y agoNope, but you can probably do something (evil/workable) with common formats like RTF.
- dredmorbius 4y agoYou should be able to convert those to something WordPerfect will eat using tools such as Pandoc. Pandoc will generate RTF, which WordPerfect can read. https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/
- lproven 4y ago(!) Thanks for remembering and linking to my (old) blog. BTW, it's on Dreamwidth now, because Livejournal is Russian, and I live 1 country away from Ukraine. https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/ https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/
- bluedino 4y agoOne of my first jobs was for a local MSP who had a lot of law offices as clients. Beyond the massive CD towers that contained Lexis Nexis and other legal libraries, everyone used WordPerfect. For DOS. Why would you do this, when Windows and Office 97 existed? You could view open documents and scroll through them with the keyboard. Click, click, click, click - "That's the one I need!", a lawyer would bark out. It took far too much time to use the mouse and open documents one-by-one. Even if you hit Alt, F, O, you still had to scroll through hundreds or thousands of files, try to remember where you were...back then you had friendly filenames like DM928032.WDP
- Telemakhos 4y agoLawyers and architects used WordPerfect long after Word rose to power because WordPerfect gave fine-grained control over line numbering that Word did not.
- dredmorbius 4y agoAccurate word counts is another capability that's often cited.
- lizknope 4y agoI was in college from 1993-97 and ran Linux on my PC. I started to learn LaTeX but I realized that it was easier to just write reports in text and do a tiny amount of formatting in HTML. I could use img src to include a few diagrams and then print it out in the computer lab.
- Shared404 4y agoI've done this a couple times. The last time I needed to present in a class I wrote each slide in markdown, slapped some css on there, and called it a day. Not perfect, but good enough.