[conspire] WP again

[Christian Einfeldt]

Hi,

I found this message over at the Linux mafia site, and I wanted to 
just post it here, because I know that some of the wizards on this 
list would have comments about it.  Bruce Byfield, for example, has 
written several detailed enlightening articles on functional 
comparisons of OOo and MSO, and so maybe he or others could address 
some of the issues discussed below. 

Thanks,

Christian Einfeldt
415-351-1300

> The reason I want to install Corel is that I want to have 
> WordPerfect....

Oh, by the way, if your interest is limited to reading/writing files 
in
WP format, there is recent good news:  Recently released 
OpenOffice.org
1.1.3 finally includes the libwpd-based import/export filter 
for .wpd
files that has been in development for a year or so.  Also, recent
versions of AbiWord have been pretty good in that department.

Neither of those is WordPerfect, of course:  WP for Linux, for all 
its 
faults -- no TrueType support or other modern font features, no 
modern
printing subsystem, funky Motif-based aesthetics, no direct PDF 
export,
no support for modern file formats such as the OASIS XML format and 
the
post-Word97 MS-Word format, menu shortcuts that break when Caps Lock 
or
Num Lock are on, no plug-in interface for things like aspell, no
automated conversion of ASCII files across *ix/Windows/Mac platorms, 
no
preview function, no address book integration, no support for CORBA
component-software brokers, no GNOME/KDE integration -- it's still 
fast,
light, polished, has "reveal codes", has shrink-to-print, has a good
macro language, has excellent built-in mathematical, financial, 
logical,
and string-handling functions, has excellent table support and a 
useful
speed-table-formatting feature. supports a huge number of old 
printers
directly, and has amazingly good, fast printed output.



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