<quote who="Kent West"> > I know it's not appropriate to rant, especially off-topic, but I > just gotta! > > I really miss WordPerfect! And I wish there were some open-source > software that did what it does.
i sorta miss wordperfect too. though wordperfect office 2000 was virtually unusable for me.last time i used it, it couldn't export PDFs, consumed gobs of memory, couldn't print graphics, was unstable, did not behave well with afterstep(dialog boxes would often pop under the main window). i got a buncha word perfect docs that i wrote at a former job.. i printed some recently but had to install corel linux in vmware in order to get corel office to work. i think i paid about $100 for it, but only got about 3-4 hours of real use out of it, another 2 hours or so reconstructing documents after a WP crash or exporting them to word6 format so i could import them into office97 on aonther machine so i could print graphics. applixware has been no good for me either. i bought version 4, it was ok, i never really used it. i tried a pirated copy of version 5 for about 10 minutes, but it was severely broken, semeemd to depend on a special font server which didn't like my system so the app took 5 minutes to load, and had other odd things so it didn't last 10 minutes on my system. star office ..while a memory hog for the things i do(very basic stuff) is rock solid. has never crashed always prints right, and is very well behaved in afterstep. i'd gladly pay $100 or so for it if they were charging its by far the best office suite for linux/unix that i've used sofar. my needs are very basic though, 98% of my work is done in vi or gnotepad+ about the only thing i use star office for is for things that need big fonts for shipping labels, fax cover sheets etc. i could just as easily run office2000 in vmware at near native speeds but i just don't like MS products. printing from gnotepad+ even with larger fonts does not appear to work last time i tried, the font size does not change on the printer(Laserjet4000 printing to a remote lpd which in turn spools to a NT4 system) i remember WP8 the stand alone app, never really used it much though. maybe Koffice will turn out good, doubt i will be using it anytime soon as long as it depends on so many dozens of libraries though. one of the things i really like about star office is at least on every system ive used it on(redhat, debian, solaris/sparc) i never had to install extra packages to install it. even applixware5 had to install some package before it would install .. openoffice seems to be a year or 2 away from anything solid from what i've read. nate
