2. What is WordPerfect

WordPerfect is a popular, fully-featured commercial word processor program that is available for multiple platforms including Linux. It was originally written and sold by WordPerfect Corporation, subsequently purchased by Novell, then purchased about a year or so ago by Corel Corporation (Ottawa, Ontario, CA). Corel has outsourced the development of WordPerfect for UNIX (including Linux) to SDC Corporation, a corporation including former WordPerfect developers, and specializing in development for UNIX and X windows.

Until the release of Microsoft Word, WordPerfect was the most popular word processor for personal computers (it still claims to be by volume of product shipped, some reports indicate that more copies were sold than Microsoft Word during recent months). WordPerfect was originally written for DOS and later ported to the UNIX and Windows environments. Initial versions of WordPerfect for Windows were very late to market and tended to crash a lot, hence opening the floodGATES for Microsoft Word. WordPerfect is still a better word processor than Word for large documents or documents that must be moved between Mac, UNIX, and Microsoft platforms.

WordPerfect provides a WYSWYG environment for editing text documents. One of the best features is the ability to check your spelling as you type. Included are grammar checker, spelling checker, graphics import and export, and the ability to edit HTML documents. Documents created by WordPerfect on one platform may be read, edited, and printed on other platforms (I have generated a lot of documents using WP 6.0 (Caldera's release) and distributed them to Windows 95 users using WP 7.0 or 8.0).

WordPerfect runs on the following platforms (release or beta versions):

• Linux 1.2.13 (WordPerfect 6.0 for Linux, sold by Caldera)
• Linux 2.0.X (WordPerfect 6.0 and WordPerfect 7.0)
• Microsoft DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT
• Macintosh
• HP-UX 10.01
• IBM AIX 4.1.4
• SCO OpenServer 5.0.0
• Sun SPARC Solaris 2.5
• SUN SPARC SunOS 4.1.x
• SUN X86 Solaris 2.5.1
• Digital UNIX 3.2 G Alpha
• SCO 3.2.4.2