Kids today and their fancy Office 365.
Look at you Mr. Fancy Pants using Windows.
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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I had Corel WordPerfect for Linux.
You could modify the SGML codes to create documents that were compatible with all other versions of WordPerfect and MS Word, but he features that were supported in the document format, but not in the software.
For instance, I could change use more than the 16 colours that the Word for Windows UI allowed you to use, even though the displayed correctly in the WYSIWYG editor and printed correctly.
Oh god, SGML. That's a memory I had successfully repressed.
I used to write my Computer Science assignments in DocBook (XML). It would amaze the assessor’s when they said they wanted a PDF or PostScript or HTML or whatever and I would spit out a document custom formatted for whichever platform they wanted.
Then they would ask for it in Word DOC and I would be screwed.
Hell yeah. I ran Corel Linux their last gasp at a pivot….
Before Correl bought WordPerfect and made it usable!
WordPerfect was a nightmare to use, and I’m very glad that it’s dead.
I was about to say. Wp5 on dos 5.0 with the blue screen.
I think this was the version right before WYSIWIG support was added. So you could still use fonts, and change font sizes but on screen it would show a strange notation but not the actual font. Complex layouts were tough 😅
I miss old-school WordPerfect. Our school was largely using Office 97, but one teacher preferred WP, and we had to use it in that particular class.
My biggest takeaway from it was that, contrary to what MS would have you believe, it is absolutely possible to put formatting options in logical places in menus. Everything about WP was just so intuitive.
You never got stuck in formatting hell on word-perfect apparently.
It was pretty easy in creating new original documents.
Editing existing documents was an absolute nightmare. The list was extremely long of random shit that would happen we you deleted some text.
I never really ran into that, and part of the curriculum for that class was editing / correcting other people's documents.
Was that only if you imported a document from a different format, perhaps?
There were a few times I encountered slight formatting glitches, but we were taught to just turn on Reveal Codes to easily find/fix those.
I am not quite that old, but I learned digital media creation in the Macromedia Suite... Dreamweaver, Flash... before Adobe bought them out.
I cut my hobby web design teeth on Macromedia Fireworks. Adobe's output sucks in comparison to mm.
I, too, was forged in the fires of Macromedia.
Before the dark times. Before the empire.
Dreamweaver was my favorite way to create webpages back in the days of HTML 4.
Fun fact: Macromedia didn’t create Flash. They bought out another company
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/software/futuresplash-animator-in-1996
Fun fact, I read that GRRM still writes using a DOS copy of WordPerfect
Maybe he just hasn't written anything since it was the standard.
Daaaaaamn
Back in my day, and to this day, Microsoft offers such huge discounts in academia on licensing, and recruit so many students from university, I never saw anything but MS.
I'm glad we are at least in an age that there's alternative to Microsoft in the free and open source space for individuals even when school goes down their path.
Needs more toolbar buttons.
I had MS Works for DOS at home as a ternager. Let's just say I don't miss the way spell check worked before the red squiggly line was invented.
I too was once a ternager 😉
@anonybirdy All official sources (schools, etc) around here were running Microsoft products -- aka Microsoft Word, but several of my family members were almost obsessive about WordPerfect back in the day. My aunt used WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS up until something like 2010. She even had old keyboards with extra function keys for it (went up to something like F20.)
@anonybirdy My mother also used it, but was willing to adapt to the Windows version around 7 or so I think. She used it for years and years until one day my father turned Apple fanatic and eventually convinced her Apple was the only one true deity. It was a hot mess trying to get the Mac port to work if I recall (or was that some weird Word port? I forget what she even had.) Eventually she gave up typing.
Formatting in word-perfect was so easy. You could turn on view all formatting and it made sense. Bold on here, bold off here .
This was long before Word came along and formatting became some invisible apply-object thing
Word perfect in 1990 was better than Word is today.
Man, reminds me of how we used AlphaSmart machines, which were like horrible little physical word processors. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Alphasmart_pro.jpg
WordPerfect 5. On DOS. Over NetWare. But XyWrite was the one true wordprocessor.