Whats good about WordPerfect?
Several things. In an era when leading word processors gobble dozens of megs of RAM just launching, WP (v. 8.x) is thrifty — about 6 MB. By comparison, OpenOffice.org 1.1 or Star Office 7.0 takes 54 MB to launch. AbiWord 2.01 uses only 15 MB, and KWord 1.2.94 32 MB. It’s a stable, fast, polished, full-featured product. It has “reveal codes”. It has a nearly unique “shrink to fit” printing feature that quickly becomes indispensable once you’ve experienced it. WP’s high-performance print module uses the MS-DOS version’s time-tested, robust printer drivers by default, expanding greatly the range of compatible printers. (WP can alternatively hand off to standard Unix printing subsystems — lpr / lprng / gnulpr / cups / pdq / etc. — in “Passthru Postscript” mode, to use the system’s own standard print drivers.) It has excellent built-in mathematical, financial, logical, and string-handling functions. It has excellent table support and a useful speed-table-formatting feature. It has a time
