Have 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.
Replying 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.
The 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.
> 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.
Outlook 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.
They 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".
On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them... It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."
I haven't seen it with Word, which I use quite a lot, but there is one similar and extremely long-standing bug. When you use a keyboard shortcut to turn bold/italics on, then type a word immediately before a non-whitespace character, then use the shortcut to turn it back off, it will un-bold the thing you just bolded. So annoying.
I 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.
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.
I think WordPerfect 8 was where Corel rewrote it. It didn't work nearly as well. I vaguely recall they switched from native to some kind of compatibility layer (maybe Wine?) which just wasn't very good.
I 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.
docker has no concept of the binaries that actually run, it just sets up namespaces, cgroups and a userspace. worse case scenario, you have to run the docker container as privileged, still no difference from running on host (at least with a properly constructed image, where the binaries wouldn't run as root)
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.