Re: [vox] WANTED: WordPerfect for linux.

[Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.MAPScom>]

Quoting Richard Crawford (rscrawford@mossroot.com):

> I have found WP for Linux hideously unreliable, even though I have long
> preferred WordPerfect as my word processor of choice.  I couldn't have
> more than five or so documents open at once or it would crash. 

You're speaking there of WP 9, the version in Corel Office 2000.
Version 8 was much, much more stable, and ran in much less RAM -- 
about 6 MB.  

The key difference was of course that v. 9 was _not_ a real Linux port
at all, but rather a winelib version, essentially setting up an
artificial emulated environment for running Win32 code on Linux.  Yuck!

You can still find xwp (WP for X11) v. 8 around a few places, but all of
them are technically unauthorised, since Corel's licence was
non-transferrable and did not include redistribution rights, although v.
8 downloads were free of charge as long as they were offered.

> Sometimes it would just crash for the hell of it, and I'd have to kill
> all Corel and WINE processes to get it launchable again.  Finally, a
> month or so ago, I went and converted all of my WordPerfect documents to
> Word, and use Open Office for everything.

OpenOffice.org (please note correct name) is indeed a nice achievement,
and I heartily recommend it.  A few holes in it, created by Sun's lack
of ownership of some code used in the StarOffice codebase, can be
plugged after installation:

o   No ability to import WP (*.wpd) documents.  You found one way to
    deal with this, but it's available only using other proprietary
    code (xwp v. 9, MS-Word, WP for Win32, etc.).  My preferred tool:
    wp2latex.  Not perfect, but Works for Me<tm>.

o   No database.  (Star Office's database is Adabas D, licensed from
    Software AG.)  But for the Linux version of OpenOffice.org, you
    can plug in MySQL or PostgreSQL without much trouble:

    http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/openoffice.org-database
    http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/openoffice.org-mysql.pdf 

o   In multiuser situations, there's a file-locking bug that needs
    to be fixed:

    http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/openoffice.org-filelocking

o   There's a bug in management of the fonts cache, with a fairly 
    simple interim fix.  Also, there is a limitation in rendering 
    of some TrueType fonts at small font sizes, because of an Apple
    Computer patent.  And you can supplement OpenOffice.org's slender
    collection of fonts if you like, by raiding StarOffice 5.2's
    proprietary collection (of fonts, templates, icons, bitmaps, 
    sound files, etc.).  All covered in:

    http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/openoffice.org-fonts
    http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html 

o   The printing support is a little rocky, still.  No fix except
    waiting for more-mature code, to my knowledge.  For similar
    reasons, the spelling-check code is a little rough, and an
    open-source thesaurus module hasn't yet been written.

-- 
Cheers,            There are only 10 types of people in this world -- 
Rick Moen          those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't.
rick@linuxmafia.com
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