So you’re saying… invisible formatting codes are evil?
I remember WordStar more than WordPerfect. I’ve read that many fiction authors still use WordStar because the keyboard bindings were designed for touch-typists.
My mother, a professor, just made the switch from WordPerfect to Word a couple years ago, but she still has both on her computer so that she can read her old documents.
I steer clear of WYSIWYG, myself. I’d much prefer to write and edit in a plain text editor. Format later, when it’s done. It’s far, far more productive, and you’re not locked into the bad toolset that’s integrated with your word processor.
In Search of Stupidity by Rick Chapman covers the fall of Word Perfect as well (albeit much more briefly than Almost Perfect).
The only time I’ve ever had or encountered a problem with Word (DOS or Windows) losing formatting is if the carriage return at the end of a paragraph is deleted since it carries the paragraph formatting.
Let’s say your cursor is at the beginning of an italicized word and you press the delete key. In Word, the result is an italicized word less its first character. In WP, it depends on whether your cursor was before or after the begin-ital code, which you can move across using left or right cursor keys, but without visible movement on screen. If you’re before it, pressing delete leaves the word the same, removes the italics and leaves the end-ital cruft in place!
I still use WordPerfect. The in-line formatting codes are a lifesaver at times.
Sure, with careless editing you can build up quite a pile of them but I know when I’m doing things that are likely to cause that and I prune them at the time.
Word does the same thing but you don’t see it happen–but you can get yourself into a situation where it’s all but impossible to fix the mess. More than once I’ve loaded up WordPerfect to fix someone’s possessed Word document.
Hmmm … they did use to say you only needed to remember one function key - F7. Spell check, print and save and quit (can’t remember which was the key alone/ctrl/shift/alt). But if you just wanted to bash stuff in it worked fine.
I supported it for years on Solaris and vt220’s running on Solaris, plus DOS, of course. I remember creating the keyboard map for the other Sun workstation keyboard.
It also was the first one that did tables properly, which is now so commonplace now no-one remembers how difficult it was, having to use non-proportional fonts and tabs. Unless you used latex or troff, of course (hah!).
The Windows (3.1) version was very slow and had some stupid bugs that made it spin unless you removed some formatting codes.
Ah, happy days.
My only real memory of WordPerfect is the Print command being shift+F9 (I think) and the Quit Without Saving command being F9. I can’t count the number of people who came into the computer lab, wrote a 2 or 3 page paper then hit F9 to print.
WP’s hidden format codes rule. If you want to move out of the end of a code, you just hit the right arrow key. Not having this feature in either of MS and Sun’s equivalents is a total pain, especially if you’re typing at the end of a document (the only work around is to type everything with some dummy text at the end – a spectacular waste of time that hopefully you’ll remember to remove before printing).
And only idiots who don’t know how to use a word processor edit their documents in such a way as to generate a morass of codes that do nothing. If you didn’t mean to insert a code to put some text in a particular font, you should undo it. It’s perfectly logical.
If you write a program so as to second-guess idiots’ inputs, you just end up with something that’s broken for anyone who knows what they’re doing.
WordPerfect was the most popular word processing program in the world
In the US. Here in Israel, it was the reign of QText, a local product. It, too, was a white-on-blue DOS application. It even had a decent Windows version which was quite popular - it did Hebrew better than Word - but lost to Word around the Word97/2000 era.
I remember reading about a Ichitaro, the comparable Japanese product, overrun by Word97: http://www.google.com/search?q=Chris+Pratley+lets+talk+about+word
Jeff, I love your blog. But for the love of god it’s fugly in Chrome. For someone who has written entire posts on the benefit of learning typography, shouldn’t I get nicely rendered text on a major browser with default settings? I recall it looks equally bad in Firefox.
Can anyone else help?
Jeff, I really enjoyed Almost Perfect as well. I copied-n-pasted and reformatted all the text into one e-reader friendly file for reading on my Treo. I’d be glad to send you a copy of the file if you’d like.
(I assume that’s an OK thing to do to a freely available webbook)
Sometimes the business and making money and taking risks becomes more important than the product itself…
I don’t like Word because it does its own tricks while I write. It is many times too hard to get the results I want.
Jeff on April 5, 2009 11:21 AM
I`m using Chrome, too. But it’s perfectly fine for me.
It must be some other problem for you.
Hmm… Looking back at the site again, I see Pete Peterson grants permission to reproduce the text for personal use (like I did) but asks that we not pass such reproductions around without his permission.
So, uh… sorry about that.
I was a faithful WordPerfect user up until 2000 or so, and I still preferred it even then–but I eventually had to bow to the tide of ubiquity of Word. Oddly enough, the thing I most loved about it was the thing that Dennis complained about: the Show Formatting mode, which let you see the markup that controlled the way your document appeared. When your formatting got messed up, it was the only way to fix things. In Word, when your formatting gets messed up… you’re pretty much doomed.
– The WordPerfect user’s Lament
+1, +1, +1, +1, +1, +1, +1, +1, +1, +1
I still remember looking fruitlessly for Word’s Reveal Codes and never finding them. I think I spent a couple hours one day looking and looking (circa 1998ish), growing more and more agitated. It still irks me WordPerfect effectively died and MS Word didn’t have the decency to rob this very useful feature. Posers.
Selbst damals wurde Word für DOS häufiger verkauft.
Remember AmiPro?
Hidden deep inside Corel presentations is a little command to vectorise a bitmap image. I got some beautiful things that way, when I was too young to draw.
MS Office never surprised me like that.
Funny, for me, word perfect will always be the software with ZERO interface.
I could not imagine a more hostile application than the blank screen that greeted you when wordperfect fired up. Is it running? Did the app crash? What do I do now?
No, WP died for more reasons the failure to jump to windows effectively.
It died because even edlin and notepad gave a better user experiences. WYSIWYG wasn’t even required - once apps with helpful interfaces showed, the results were inevitable.
I’ll never think of WP vs. Word without remembering the David vs. Goliath -like Easter Egg animation in Word:
http://www.eeggs.com/items/5036.html
Yes, Microsoft was once the underdog.
In the same way we experienced the transition from control characters to wysiwyg and graphical UI, I am experiencing a transition between wiki markup and rich-text editing.
The basic need is for a presentation layer, and editing that easily and quickly manages that presentation. When we know the markup, then we absolutely control that presentation. However, when we don’t know that markup, and when we don’t have access to it, we struggle.
Microsoft Office is a delicious combination of too-complicated and very-powerful and very-easy.
Most wikis today are moderately-complicated and mildly-powerful and moderately-easy.
We need wikis that are not-complicated and very-powerful and very-easy.