Arden: PDF’s not an option. They need to be able to edit the files. And I don’t really have a choice about having them as clients. They are part of my regular, full-time job clientele.

Aw man, you just gave away the punchline!

The hardest thing about moving from Windows to OS X for me was giving up Wordperfect.

Agreed. I actually considered running WP/Mac 3.5 in Classic when I made the switch, but I knew I’d have to bite the bullet eventually.

ut based on my (admittedly limited) experience, WordPerfect can’t be a much more pleasant experience.

Lockups and crashes are lousy, of course, but WP is a dream compared to WinWord. Again, they’ve lost their edge a bit with 12 and X3, but there’s still a wealth of power and utility there. Real table of contents and index features, cross-references that maintain themselves, the ability for people with minimal training to clean up even fairly hairy formatting issues with Reveal Codes…

It’s never been entirely free of stability issues, but up to v12 it was at least better than WinWord in that regard. X3′s stability can only claim to be no worse than Word, which isn’t a very high bar.

Arden: PDF’s not an option. They need to be able to edit the files. And I don’t really have a choice about having them as clients. They are part of my regular, full-time job clientele.

dmglaw: Thanks for the offer. But I have to figure out a way to make this work on my own.

More important, however, its WordPerfect translators are not all that good in my experience. Some paragraph formatting always gets mangled, especially (but not only) in tables. NeoOffice appears to do a better job of rendering WordPerfect documents. As for converting documents to the WordPerfect formats, again my experience is not very positive—but I am talking about issues affecting French texts in particular.

silas: I am only bad-mouthing WP based on the fact that it freezes when I try to open certain RTF files that open just fine in any other application (Mac or Windows) that I try—and that it adds “Z” prefixes to my accented “é” characters without my permission. (Dan: I agree with you that it probably has to do with Unicode…) Apart from that, I don’t have any specific problems with it :-). As for the “Reveal Codes” stuff, well, it’s just a bit too scary for me and my good old WYSIWYG inclinations… (And the government agencies that I work for certainly don’t seem to have that great a need for “powerful and exact formatting options.” I barely ever get any documents that use style sheets in any way, shape or form, let alone half-properly.)

I am certainly not defending Microsoft, either with respect to its industrial tactics or with respect to the quality of its own products, far from it! But based on my (admittedly limited) experience, WordPerfect can’t be a much more pleasant experience.

I am always keeping an eye on word-processing alternatives, and am waiting for the “Pro” version of Nisus. I’ll have to see how good a job it does with WordPerfect files.

Wordperfect in its day was far an away the best word processing program available, on any OS. Say the words “reveal codes” in public and you’re bound to be harassed by seom former WP junkie. It was better than MS Word, and cheaper, which is why government agencies used it. Its powerful and exact formatting options made it the best choice for law firms. Corporations went to MS, thanks to expensive lobbying and the necessity of Excel and Powerpoint compatibility, and eventually law firms were forced to change as well, to communicate with their corporate clients.) Anyway, that’s point 1: before you go bad-mouthing WP, realize that it once was the best thing out there. Version 10 was great. The hardest thing about moving from Windows to OS X for me was giving up Wordperfect.

Point 2: it was hard until I realized that OS X, being a smaller market, has much better competitive choice among word processors. The one that I settled on, that not enough people know about, is Nisus Writer Express. It’s got the best UI of any word processor I’ve ever worked with; it’s half the price of MS Word; it’s compatible with MS Word files, and with many of Word’s more advanced features; and it opens Wordperfect files flawlessly. In addition to being the best word processor I’ve ever used, NWE has enabled me to bring everything I wrote for ten years over to OS X with me, with no fuss.

Oh, and Nisus has a Pro version coming out in a couple months. If you continue to work with .wpd files, and just because it’s a great program, I suggest you check it out.

From versions 6 to 10, WordPerfect was far and away superior to Word on Windows. They’ve lost some of the advantage, and unfortunately it’s not because Word has gotten better.

There’s one area where Word is now better: international language support was a strong point for WordPerfect for many, many years, but WP never moved to Unicode, so its internationalization looks really hacky by comparison to everything else these days.

This may be what you’re running into with your RTFs; when I last looked into RTFs and Unicode (mid-2004), OpenOffice was writing them incorrectly. (The RTF spec asked for both ANSI *and* Unicode characters in the file, and OpenOffice was only inserting the Unicode characters. It’s likely that WordPerfect would choke on these files.)