4 ms·

My dad is also a lawyer and is extremely sad about the demise of WP. I wonder if there's something about the feature set that makes it good for lawyers.

Curmudgel 12y ago
For what it's worth, I also know several lawyers that were unhappy when they were eventually forced to switch from WP to Microsoft Word.
EpicEng 12y ago
Wow, same with my Mom, who is a lawyer.
benjohnson 12y ago
This could be incorrect: I've been told by layers that WP got the word count feature right at a time when MS Word often didn't. Apparently, certain aspects of the profession demand that some documents don't go above a limit. As I understood it - if they do, then the document can be thrown out by the opposing side.
chiph 12y ago
Part of it was their existing base of WP template documents. They could charge hundreds of dollars for a filing or demand document that was nothing more than a mail-merge.
kazinator 12y ago
I worked as an IT person for a fairly big law firm in the summer of 1989, and as a part time contractor during the rest of the year and early 1990. It was an all WordPerfect shop, with a Novell Netware LAN. :) I'm not sure about the feature set, but WordPerfect was once very wildly popular in the corporate world in general, not only in law firms! In the late 1980's, word processing on a DOS PC pretty much meant WordPerfect; it was the leading product. And, of course, lawyers produce reams of documents, which usually have to stick around for a long time. So they don't like converting documents from one form to another; of course they will gripe about the demise of software. A document produced by a lawyer in 1990 might still need to be accessible today. A memo produced by some random manager in some random corporation produced in 1990 is probably long forgotten. Some old-time ex-users of WordPerfect will tend to bring up the "Reveal Codes" function. Wordperfect documents had a kind of markup language consisting of codes; and you could drop into that level to see how some markup (like bold, italics or whatever) is really represented, and fix it. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes Oh, and there are some clues in the same page about the connection between the legal world and WordPerfect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers "A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations."
- to3m 12y ago
  Reveal Codes was my favourite WordPerfect feature. (I'm not a lawyer though.) It wasn't so much that it revealed how things are represented, because the coding was simplistic enough that there wasn't any real underlying representation as such separate from the document formatting - it simply told you where regions of one style began an ended. Like looking at an HTML document in View Source mode. You could have half the display dedicated to Reveal Codes, as I recall, and edit in either mode as you went along (a bit like Dreamweaver). Made it super-easy to keep things in line. Word, by contrast, makes it very unclear where one format begins and the next ends, meaning it's all too easy to make a mess. (Back when I still used Word, though maybe they've fixed it by now, it was very common for the space after the last character in a page before a manual page break to have the format of the following page, for example! Caused havoc when trying to style the last sentence...)
  - kazinator 12y ago
    Reveal Codes was well implemented from a usability perspective. Ordinary non-programming people like office secretaries understood and liked Reveal Codes: they could "get under the hood" of the document without learning a markup language, and understand the mess they made with multiple layers of overlapping formatting and whatnot.
- noir_lord 12y ago
  I actually preferred wordstar (though I was 9 at the time so my opinion is suspect) I still remember writing "Things that Might Have Killed the Dinosaurs" on an XT Clone in (oh god) '89.
  - kazinator 12y ago
    I used Wordstar by means of a Z80 coprocessor card plugged into my Apple II+ clone, which enabled it to run the CP/M operating system. In elementary school and high school, I used Wordstar for essays and term papers. I used WordPerfect at university, but ditched word processors forever after seeing a presentation lecture about LaTeX.

Curmudgel 12y ago

For what it's worth, I also know several lawyers that were unhappy when they were eventually forced to switch from WP to Microsoft Word.

EpicEng 12y ago

Wow, same with my Mom, who is a lawyer.

benjohnson 12y ago

This could be incorrect: I've been told by layers that WP got the word count feature right at a time when MS Word often didn't. Apparently, certain aspects of the profession demand that some documents don't go above a limit. As I understood it - if they do, then the document can be thrown out by the opposing side.

chiph 12y ago

Part of it was their existing base of WP template documents. They could charge hundreds of dollars for a filing or demand document that was nothing more than a mail-merge.

kazinator 12y ago

I worked as an IT person for a fairly big law firm in the summer of 1989, and as a part time contractor during the rest of the year and early 1990. It was an all WordPerfect shop, with a Novell Netware LAN. :) I'm not sure about the feature set, but WordPerfect was once very wildly popular in the corporate world in general, not only in law firms! In the late 1980's, word processing on a DOS PC pretty much meant WordPerfect; it was the leading product. And, of course, lawyers produce reams of documents, which usually have to stick around for a long time. So they don't like converting documents from one form to another; of course they will gripe about the demise of software. A document produced by a lawyer in 1990 might still need to be accessible today. A memo produced by some random manager in some random corporation produced in 1990 is probably long forgotten. Some old-time ex-users of WordPerfect will tend to bring up the "Reveal Codes" function. Wordperfect documents had a kind of markup language consisting of codes; and you could drop into that level to see how some markup (like bold, italics or whatever) is really represented, and fix it. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes Oh, and there are some clues in the same page about the connection between the legal world and WordPerfect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers "A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations."

to3m 12y ago
Reveal Codes was my favourite WordPerfect feature. (I'm not a lawyer though.) It wasn't so much that it revealed how things are represented, because the coding was simplistic enough that there wasn't any real underlying representation as such separate from the document formatting - it simply told you where regions of one style began an ended. Like looking at an HTML document in View Source mode. You could have half the display dedicated to Reveal Codes, as I recall, and edit in either mode as you went along (a bit like Dreamweaver). Made it super-easy to keep things in line. Word, by contrast, makes it very unclear where one format begins and the next ends, meaning it's all too easy to make a mess. (Back when I still used Word, though maybe they've fixed it by now, it was very common for the space after the last character in a page before a manual page break to have the format of the following page, for example! Caused havoc when trying to style the last sentence...)
- kazinator 12y ago
  Reveal Codes was well implemented from a usability perspective. Ordinary non-programming people like office secretaries understood and liked Reveal Codes: they could "get under the hood" of the document without learning a markup language, and understand the mess they made with multiple layers of overlapping formatting and whatnot.
noir_lord 12y ago
I actually preferred wordstar (though I was 9 at the time so my opinion is suspect) I still remember writing "Things that Might Have Killed the Dinosaurs" on an XT Clone in (oh god) '89.
- kazinator 12y ago
  I used Wordstar by means of a Z80 coprocessor card plugged into my Apple II+ clone, which enabled it to run the CP/M operating system. In elementary school and high school, I used Wordstar for essays and term papers. I used WordPerfect at university, but ditched word processors forever after seeing a presentation lecture about LaTeX.