TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
At one point, back in the late 1970s (????) I was using WordPerfect, and then moved to MS Symphony for a while... I don't remember exactly but somewhere along the line Word was split off of Windows...
I just tried to look at what version of Windows I have (11) I think, but that dumped me into a Gmail killer routine.
Gwen Brown
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WP for DOS
Because WP for DOS was not designed for use with a mouse, both hands stayed on the keyboard. Once you learned all the function keys — and I had lots of experience with which to do that — a touch-typist could be blazingly quick. That was, in fact, the last program I used that allowed me to type faster than I can think. That particular ability, however, is only useful for typing something that’s already been written. And who does that anymore? :)
— Emma
Remember
Remember WP, I still use it. Though that is now called Corel. I miss the easy commands. Some translate to Word, but working on advanced degrees requiring all submissions to be in Microsoft Word forced me to make the change. Oh well, I still remember Professional Write too though, but that is back a few decades.
Melissa
Word what?
I liked word star best.
BAK 0.25tspgirl
for me
the first WP software i used, back around 1985, was Lotus 123 on what we would now consider to be a very clunky desktop that was really just a portal to the mainframe. I've never been a fast typer, i still pretty much use one finger although at one time i did get to two hands and four fingers, anyhow, that set up was so slow that even i could type whole sentences but then have to wait for everything to catch up!
Over the years i've used all sorts of WP software, some a lot better than others, currently i'm using Libre, not my favourite but generally it works, this version is a lot better than the previous time i used it. In essence there was no problem with that first WP software but MS et al want to make money so they 'develop' new versions with new stuff that we didn't know we needed and usually don't want, make it incompatible with anything else and sell it to us again and so on, on repeat. Businesses mostly get little choice in the matter, home users though do have some discretion even if most new machines arrive loaded with MS software, vive la differance!
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Old tech
Back in the fifth grade, my schoolteacher despaired over my handwriting. That issue got solved with my parents' purchase of an Apple ][e, The Incredible Jack word processor, and ye olde dot matrix printer.
My weekly 'spelling stories' (requiring use of every word in the week's spelling list) suddenly went from one page handwritten to 2-3 pages typed...
A bit cumbersome for me.
I remember when I took a look at Word Perfect and I found it a bit cumbersome. I was working for a small Office Equipment company. I was there when we offered our first computer for our customers. An AVL Eagle II computer. It was a turn-key CP/M machine. It didn't take too long to find out that serious customers didn't want a turn-key machine. We got a CP/M disk for the computer and I found I had to learn the ins and outs of an operating system.
Even then we found that the Eagle II was inadequate for our customers. We then went with a new company EXO computers. Long story short, most of our customers were niche market and needed special software so I learned to write in dBase II. Word Perfect was useless for that because is saved files with a none printable page break that caused dBase routines to hang. So I started using Perfect Writer, which saved everything in plain text. It was not a WYSIWYG word processor. You had to be very involved in what it would look like when you printed it out. Which was fine, because producing routines in dBase was much the same kind of mind set.
We were slow in changing over to DOS based machines, but when we did I still produced niche solutions for our customers, now in dBase III. Then when another employee and I went out on our own, I became a computer consultant. Word Perfect made a stab a following the move to 16 bit machines, but with all the WYSIWYG already there and established, they couldn't compete. I had one of the last DOS Word Perfect disks produced.
I used it and two other pieces of software to create EXE files from dBase IV routines that ran standalone. Up until Windows ditched DOS I was able to make a fair living writing niche software with that cheat work around for never having learned a higher programing language
Somehow, I still miss Perfect Writer. As a tribute to that software, the folder on my hard drive that I save my Word files is called PW.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Eagle II
I bought an Eagle II in 1982. I later replaced the two single-sided disk drives with two double-sided drives and had an Eagle III! I was for some years Chairman and President of the Eagle Computer User's Group, Inc., based in the San Jose, Calf. area.
The Eagle computers came with a spreadsheet program called Ultracalc, which was not very good, so I soon replaced it with Supercalc, which was excellent. The word processing program was Spellbinder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Computer#Spellbinder_wor...), which was a first-rate word processor. With my Xerox Diablo 620 daisy wheel printer it made a great combo with high quality output. However, impact printers are noisy, and laser printers are not only quiet, they're faster and more flexible.
For programming use, Spellbinder could save in ASCII format, stripping out all formatting commands.Back when I wrote programs in CBASIC, I used Spellbinder to write the program and then saved it in ASCII format.
Corel Word Perfect and Quattro Pro (excel) are my go to programs
Last September I upgraded to the current iteration of both for word processing and spreadsheets. For me I find both to be more intuitive and better than MS products. If I have something that NEEDS to be in MS or other programs, WP has options to allow the entire file to be saved as the NEEDED program. What I do to post my stories on BC is to simply copy & paste, I highlight what I want, copy it, and paste it into the story section on BC.
Boys will be girls... if they're lucky!
Jennifer Sue
I use CSE HTML VALIDATOR
for all of my writing needs I use: https://www.htmlvalidator.com/?srsltid=AfmBOooJK0wQy7FxxoJ3i... . It works and html codes at the same time. While not an absolute true writer, its abilities to tab multiple stories at once makes it more than useful to myself. Plus I can change the background of the screen to a more suitable color and fonts to various colors if I need.
Plus it allows rapid reuse of code by copying and pasting from one tab to another.
Sephrena
Yes, I remember fondly
Way back in 1989 I received copies of WordPerfect 4.2 as well as WordPerfect 5.0, together with a 1.200 page independent manual on how to use WordPerfect 5. I went straight to WordPerfect 5.0, then got hold of version 5.1 and eventually version 5.2. If I remember correctly, both 5.1 and 5.2 came in variants for DOS, Macintosh and Windows. By the time WordPerfect 6 was finally rolled out, the focus had shifted away from DOS towards Windows.
WordPerfect 5 for DOS was very powerful, but could also be used for very simple documents. There were a lot of command codes, and the function keys four different assignments each ([Fn], Shift+[Fn], Ctrl+[Fn], Alt+[Fn]). Knowing the keyboard shortcuts really made for fast typing!
I learned to use footnotes, end-notes, cross-references, automatic table of contents, formatting with styles, page numbering, outline numbering, document structure with sub-documents as well as parallel columns all with WordPerfect 5 for DOS. Output quality was dependent on the type of printer you had, so you spent your efforts on the content of your document rather than the presentation (a.k.a. fancy formatting).
A lot of the fast access to functionality was lost with the move to Windows. All of a sudden you had to remove one hand from the keyboard, grab the rodent and through three or four levels of menus and sub-menus. The early Windows 3.0 interface in 1993 was still rather clunky and the graphical fonts were very ugly on a 9-pin dot matrix printer at anything smaller than 14-16 pt font size. With a 24-pin matrix printer you could go down to 12 pt, but anything smaller quickly became unreadable. Your best bet was still to use the built-in printer fonts that were generally mono-spaced at 10 and 12 characters per inch. (Remember the trusty old mechanical typewriter?) Though ink-jet printers — the poor man's laser printer — changed that with resolutions of up to 300 dpi.
I never got into WordStar — the other widely popular word processor at the time — because I had no documentation for it. While I had very comprehensive documentation for WordPerfect. While the former was supposedly the Volkswagen, I felt the latter was the Mercedes of word processors.
By late 1993 I switched over to MS Word 5 for Windows. Though I still kept WordPerfect 5 for DOS around for its powerful and professional grade features. It was MS Word 6 (around 1995) that finally caught up to the professional grade features of WordPerfect 5. Though Microsoft never managed a decent implementation of parallel columns. I also never used the dumbed down version of MS Works, which had an incompatible document file format to MS Word.
By the time MS Office 97 rolled out, Microsoft really started price gouging (two to three minimum monthly salaries for a single license) and swatting user for piracy followed by criminal prosecution. So started looking for a viable replacement among open source software that was free for the download.
Around 2004 I moved to OpenOffice, which later forked into LibreOffice as we know it today. The document conversion from MS Office 97 was easier than the previous conversion from WordPerfect 5 to MS Word 5/6. Though there were a few highly advanced features that did not convert, but I was able to find a work-around for that 3%.
Today I use the LibreOffice Writer for writing and editing my text, with no or minimal formatting. Once I am happy with the content, spelling, grammar and punctuation of my text, I will copy it over to TeX/LaTeX/XeTeX for a polished and professional looking formatting. The TeX typesetting tool family gives me all those powerful and professional features I got to know and love in WordPerfect 5, plus some more. Especially the document structuring into sub-documents with page numbering, end-notes, cross-references, tables of content, indices, citations and bibliographies working seamlessly across all sub-documents. For an uncluttered content editing flow I can keep footnotes, end-notes and bibliographic citations in separate files that get pulled together during the formatting and typesetting phase.
Although lately I find myself using a plain text editor — similar to the Windows Notepad — more often than the word processor.
Microsoft Word
Before there was Microsoft Word for Windows, there was Microsoft Word for DOS. I started using it in 1987 on an IBM PC/XT because it was the standard for the company I worked for then. I actually came to like it a lot. It went away once Windows 3.0 was released and was replaced by Word for Windows.