WordPerfect

WordPerfect is a proprietary word processing application. At the height of its popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the de facto standard word processor, but has since been eclipsed in sales by Microsoft Word. more...

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Although the DOS and Microsoft Windows versions are best known, its popularity was based on the fact that it had been available for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, including Mac OS, Linux, the Apple IIe, a separate version for the Apple IIgs, most popular versions of Unix, VMS, Data General, System/370, AmigaOS, Atari ST, OS/2, and NeXTSTEP. Long before the advent of OpenOffice.org, WordPerfect was perhaps the first multi-platform office suite.

WordPerfect for DOS

WordPerfect was originally produced by Bruce Bastian and Dr. Alan Ashton who founded Satellite Software International, Inc. of Orem, Utah, which later renamed itself WordPerfect Corporation. Originally written for Data General minicomputers, in 1982 the developers ported the program to the IBM PC as WordPerfect 2.20, continuing the version numbering of the Data General series.

The program's popularity took off with the introduction of WordPerfect 4.2 in 1986, with automatic paragraph numbering (important to the law office market), and the splitting of a lengthy footnote and its partial overflow to the bottom of the next page, as if it had been professionally typeset (valuable to both the law office and academic markets). WordPerfect 4.2 became the first program to overtake the original microcomputer word processor market leader (WordStar) in a major application category on the DOS platform.

In 1989, WordPerfect Corporation released the program's most successful version ever, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which included a pull-down menu that version 5.0 lacked as well as support for tables, a spreadsheet-like feature. Unlike previous DOS versions, WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS ran in a graphical mode, presenting WYSIWYG fonts and text effects like bold, underline, and italics. The previous text-based versions used different colors or text color inversions to indicate various markups.

Key characteristics

To this day, WordPerfect's three major characteristics that have differentiated from other market-leading word processors are its streaming code architecture, its Reveal Codes feature, and its unusually user-friendly macro/scripting language, PerfectScript.

Streaming code architecture

A key to WordPerfect's design is its streaming code architecture that parallels the formatting features of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. Documents are created much the same way that raw HTML pages are written, with text interspersed by tags that trigger treatment of data until a corresponding closing tag is encountered, at which point the settings active to the point of the opening tag resume control. As with HTML, tags can be nested. Some data structures are treated as objects within the stream as with HTML's treatment of graphic images, e.g., footnotes and styles, but the bulk of a WordPerfect document's data and formatting codes appear as a single continuous stream.

Read more at Wikipedia.org