Tag: wordperfect

This is a WordPerfect Post

One day this summer I had, via a random internet post, nostalgia for something I never used: WordPerfect for DOS.

I started WordPerfect with version 6.0a (or something similar), on Windows 95. My parents had WordPerfect, but the site of that blue screen with just a blinking cursor scared me off.

There was a printout of the different key commands that sat onmtop of our keyboard, reminding me of this program made of, no doubt, pure dark magic.

And yet here we are.

I looked up how to start FreeDOS, which is where this story really started. It was the 20th for FreeDOS and I thought it would be fun to run it under qemu.

So, while on vacation watching the summer Olympics, I started following tutorials and learning how to run anything, much less FreeDOS under qemu.

(I have tried and failed many times to get virtual box running on Fedora for my Windows 2000 needs…)

And once it was up and running, then came the next question: now wat?

The answer seemed to be, for some reason: WordPerfect. So, more tutorials, more tweaks and there it was, that blue screen from my youth that I dreaded so.

And now, it is sorta calming, sorta quaint. Still very blue. Ok, so I figured out how to change that, and it is now an orange, which I do like better.

I should not have been surprised at the features in WordPerfect for DOS, but I was. It was the standard at the time. I had not realized the blue screen was the writing mode, it is the ‘Text View’ where you input, and there is in fact a graphical view that shows the actual page layout.

That separation of writing and layout was ahead of its time, I think.

So, am I going to follow Martin and Walton in the path of only writing in obscure ancient word processors? No… Just another tool, another thing to have to play with, to feed the distracted mind to get the fingers dancing from time to time.

Running WP under FreeDOS has one quirk for sure: you can’t easily transfer files from the virtual machine to the main computer. For that, I made a quick bash script which mounts the image, copies the fires to the main machine, and unmounts. Not sophisticated, but functional.

From there, the wpd files can be opened into LibreOffice, or I can, as I did with this, simply save them as txt files.

(Fun fact, WordPerfect spell check did not recognize “internet” as a word, and Firefox did not know “WordPerfect”)

File Format Hell

I’ve had a long journey with text file formats.

First there was… uh… whatever MS works saves files as. That was back in the Windows 3.1 era. That sucked. Then we went to Word… MS Word, and MS Word would not open MS Works files. Go figure. So there was the lovely time of opening files, ripping text from 50 pages of bad binary translation and putting them in Word.

Ok, so after Word I found Wordperfect. No, not that crappy blue screen one either, I found the joy, the wonder, the amazement of Wordperfect 8. To this day, it brings a tear to my eyes. Wordperfect opens Word, great! Absolutely nothing opens Wordperfect except, Wordperfect. Not so great.

Then later I got a copy of Lotus Smart Suite. LWP files baby. Used that for a while, mainly because of Approach. Office 2000 came out, tried that (yet again MS changes Word file formats. Meanwhile WPD files can be opened by any version of Wordperfect after 6…)

Then on to WordPerfect 9. oh, how I miss thee.

There was even some StarOffice in there, and OO.o version, uh… something. (did they do an 0.9 release? Maybe it was just 1.0.. )

Ok, then I go to a Mac.

So after much crying and pouting and general sleepless nights I get MS Office. Thank the Gods that MS Office for the Mac opens MS Office for Windows files. (Yes I was worried, don’t you remember Word 6 -> Word 95 issues? But they are the same… NO THEY ARE NOT!)

But.

Yup, what the hell do I do with SWF, LWP, WPD, WKS (i think) various Quattro Pro and 1-2-3 files (we don’t even think about databases, we learned that lesson from Access 2000)??

Well, again, there was crying and screaming.

Out comes NeoOffice (OpenOffice.org for the Mac). With it comes along ODT. Sounds great, sounds wonderful, sounds like another file format… And I realized that for 99% of my stuff i don’t need all that crap. (it is really just crap) What I need has been in front of me the whole time.

RTF

So that is my new fixation, moving everything to RTF.

Now now, you wait, Mr ODT, I ain’t saying nothing bad about you. In a way you are the next hope, possibly the next RTF. As an open standard there is hope that ODT will find itself on any platform out there. That would rock. Then you could get all the crap in there too. (and spreadsheets would be nice, I like spreadsheets.)

But for now, RTF (and even maybe TXT as back-ups) will do just fine. The goal is the future. A future where I don’t have to find a PC to install Lotus on to get a file that I swore I had backed up somewhere else in WPD format which Neo opens now, but I didn’t so NOW I gotta find a find one.

And do you know how hard it is to find a PC in a Mac house? Sheesh.