World Perfect 5.1...remember the black screen with an orange

[nadinbrzezinski]

letters? Easy on the eyes, sucked for layout, but lawyers loved it?

Well these days there are full screen editors out there that you can use that take the distractions on your puter away.

I found several that I liked...

q10 for windows has the most features... which is saying much. It saves in rtf, or prefers txt...oh has live word count and all that Unfortuntely does not like WINE...

TextRoom comes in both win and linux flavors... (I use it on my lappie under wine...easier to install than the linux on my distro)It also does the live word count and I do have to copy and paste into openoffice...it does not save in txt, but that's ok... copy, paste, walla, first draft done.

The there is pyroom and Jdarkroom. they do the same, but don't do live word count. JDarkroom is crossplatform by the way.

And for the mac, writeroom...which is actually very good, yes I paid for it and run it at home on the mac.

What is the advantage of these? It's you and your text

And with the exception of writeroom...they are all free

[HamdenRice]

1. I still use WordPerfect. There has never been a better wordprocessor.

It was the best ever. Even in its Word-like modern incarnation it's still better than Word.

The main reason that lawyers and writers love it is "reveal codes." It gives the writer so much more control over format, and this is important when you have complex format issues in a document.

I once read some guy on the internet saying that the highest achievement of any wordprocessor was WordPerfect 5.2 and it's been down hill ever since. I wouldn't go that far. I think the current WordPerfect X3 is far and away the best word processor that has ever existed.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

2. What's the difference

between plain old Word, which I use, and WordPerfect?

Am I missing something? I've been real happy with Word, and haven't had any complaints from my agent or my editor.

[HamdenRice]

3. I could write a book! There's so much to say.

But the main difference between Word and WP is the amount of control you have over the appearance of your text. I forget the technical term for it, but in essence, WP is modeled on the very first wordprocessors, run on mainframes, which were more like programming languages. In fact, to think of it, WP works a lot like html, but is much easier.

Because of the extremely precise control you can exercise over text appearance, WP was for many years favored by lawyers and academics (all those weird fonts for footnotes, paragraphs, etc.) and the legal and a university fields stayed with WP long after Word achieved market dominance. The only reason Word achieved market dominance was that MS used illegal anti-competitive means of forcing Word on purchasers of Windows, and after a tipping point was reached, when most people have Word and companies and individuals have to communicate and use each other's documents, everyone basically had to switch to Word.

But WP is still the much better program in terms of control. For example, if you italicize a word or phrase in WP, you can do it just like as in Word by highlighting it and pressing the right button. But if you need to see where the italics are, you can press "reveal codes" and you see a little icon surrounding the word that look like this:

<ital>italicized words<ital>

Every single thing that affects text appearance has a code. You can see precisely where these codes begin and end, and can manipulate them. To un-italicize the word, for example, you can go into reveal codes and delete the code.

That's really the main difference. If you came of age with WP, then Word is almost impossibly clumsy to use. I write in WP and if I need to share it with a Word user, I just convert the WP document to a Word document, which WP has a function for.

On edit: Here is a good explanation. The author says that Word is "object oriented" and WP is "stream oriented":

http://www.wpvsword.com/wp11vsword11/

http://www.wpvsword.com/reveal_codes.php

[Tangerine LaBamba]

7. Thanks..........

It's far more complicated than I require, but I can see that it would be the standard for legal and academic writing.

Me, I just write it in Word, attach it to an email, and send it to my agent's office. They do the printing there, for which I am eternally grateful. My editor and I go back and forth on changes the old-fashioned way - with galleys and FedEx.

So far, we're all happy.

Again, thank you.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. And these days you can adjust the appearance in WORD, it is just much

easier to do in WP.

Pages also does it, that is for the MAC

Oh and Open Office does as well, but again reveal codes was THE standard

[salvorhardin]

4. Never been a better word processor?

I beg to differ sir. WordStar remains the one, the only, true word processor.

[HamdenRice]

5. We're dating ourselves. Remember Multimate? Wang? nt

[salvorhardin]

6. Heh. Back when software documentation came in big, padded binders with foldout panels

And included heavy color-coded plastic keyboard templates and stickers for your keyboard.

I still remember the enormous dedicated Wang word processor the secretary in my dean's office in college used too. I think Multimate (and Ashton-Tate) had already gone before they replaced that old Wang workhorse.

It's too bad that Ashton-Tate pissed away the good will of their customers.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. You guys are dating yourselves

(For the record we HAD WP 5.1... and used it happily... these days no)

But the full screen things I posted... are distraction free... and nice in that sense

Just avoid the reveal codes, lacks those commands.

[HamdenRice]

11. Modern day WordPerfect X3 and other Windows versions has "Hide Bars"

Click on View, scroll down to Hide Bars, and everything except the text disappears, and you have full screen editing.

Because you won't have a menu to get back the bars, the first time you use it it gives you a prompt that reminds you that to get the bars back, you just press "escape."

I almost always edit without bars, because as an old die hard WP user, I still use keystrokes that I've had memorized for over 2 decades.

:rofl:

[JDPriestly]

13. I used that one too. It was the first one I used. I liked WordPerfect

better, but it may have been because by the time I got to WordPerfect, I understood word processing and was ready for WordPerfect. What do you like about WordStar? Why do you prefer it to WordPerfect?

[JDPriestly]

12. What I loved about WordPerfect was having the capacity to

see the format codes and change them as I went along. I can't see enough of the format codes in Word. I mostly use Word but have WP on my computer. I should use WP more often. Thanks for reminding me.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. And my bad, Open Office also has full screen format

and now Pages '09 (part of I-Work 09 for the Mac) has it as well...

Did I mention that Pages does have the equivalent of reveal codes? So does Open Office