"(Note: WordPerfect is still the world's best word processor by a country mile ...)" I am a former die-hard WordPerfect user. After having been forced to use MS Word at work for the last three years (though I still use WP exclusively at home), I have to disagree. There are some things that Word does more gracefully/intuitively the WordPerfect. Granted, they are few and far between, but they are critically placed. For example, ctrl+
& ctrl+ to increase/decrease font size. WP has Alt+
& Atl+ for similar functionally, but it can fill your Reveal Codes with a bunch of trash codes if you use it a lot. Another example, after you get past the learning curve of setting tabs, indents and margins in Word, WP's corresponding methods feel clunky.
The fact that you can create a document in WP12.0 and have WP6.0 open it is a bonus to some, but for me, it is evidence that WordPerfect has been stagnating and bloating since about WP8.0; the only thing of substance that gets updated is their MS Word coversion tools.
WordPerfect needs a major overhaul, but I doubt it could survive going through one at this point. The best thing that WordPerfect could do would be to dump the albatross that is its current file format and move to an HTML/CSS/XML file format. That alone could become a significant challenge to the MS Word .doc format domination. Ironically, the WordPerfect file format has been "almost there" since before WP5.1 -- before HTML even ever really came to be. WordPerfect also desparately needs to add basic forms controls features, i.e. radio buttons, check boxes, form fields, drop-down boxes, combo boxes, etc. It would be nice to create such a form/document in WordPerfect, save it to PDF, and have the checkboxes, form fields, and such functions work in the resulting PDF document--and do it all gracefully and easily.
I can print web pages from my browser, why can't my word processor create them for my browser as easily as it does hard copies? For me there really isn't that much conceptual difference between a document layout and web page layout--in concept, IE, Firefox, and PDF are just different printers. I don't need all the bells and whistles of Dreamweaver for web page layout anymore than I need Quark Xpress or InDesign for word processing. MS Word is getting closer to this by babysteps. But WordPerfect seems mostly oblivious to this concept.
I used to hope that WordPerfect would reconsider and port to OS X. But with the current state and direction of the internet, PDF, and such, what would be the point? WordPerfect needs to become so much more than it is right now before it can become a compelling piece of software again.
I guess I'll have to wait for Google or Mozilla to come to the rescue.
