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vrinsd | 1 year ago

WordPerfect really was an outstanding word processor. Reveal codes (like many others here have pointed out) made "debuging" formatting issues relatively painless as was the "make it fit to a certain layout or size" feature. In an era when you didn't really have WYSIWYG they did an excellent job of enabling users to more or less get nice looking output without having to go to TeX.

I remember it took a LONG time before there was a Windows version of WordPerfect which I think took a lot of their momentum away. Combine that with Microsoft basically giving away Office or bundling Word+Excel they succeeded in eroding market share from Lotus / WordPerfect.

I think the Lotus Suite may have even pre-dated MSFT Office as a suite (not 100% certain) and as usual functionality was often superior or better implemented than MSFT's.

Credit should also go to WordPerfect for making a Linux version in the 2000's before Linux desktop was as mature as it is today. Sadly they didn't continue this effort.

I'm glad we have LibreOffice but it's frankly a clone of MSFT Office, the UI is very cluttered and it has the same "weirdisms" that Office has.

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Gibbon1|1 year ago

The thing that got me was I used to use the second to last version of WordStar. Which had paragraph and page styles that you could import, edit and apply to text. When it became apparent that I couldn't be using Word Star to share documents anymore I tried WordPerfect and it was so annoying. You just want to set the paragraph style and start typing not play with tags. Eventually I just used Word. But styles in word wasn't nearly as obvious and straight foreword.