'Emacs style' delete line shortcut (CTRL/U) doesn't work correctly in Firefox

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 15 Oct 2018 at 15:44, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
>
> That is good news. It was always a better wordprocessor than Word,
> particularly for long or complex documents — possibly the only
> wordprocessor to create publishable quality...at the time.

Agreed.

It held on in the legal field in the UK for _decades_ and that made me
a little bit of money fixing balky systems.

When you're charging several hundred pounds per hour or per page for
documents, you want a _very_ accurate word count.

MS Word counts words in the main document. It does not (or did not)
include headers, footers, auto-generated or imported text, etc.

WordPerfect tells you how many words. All of them. With _no_ exceptions.

It also sometimes leaves bits of deleted or edited-out text in the
saved files, which can be extremely legally embarrassing.

(Due to a very clever algorithm by Charles Simonyi, which was
responsible for the program's good performance in some areas:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160308183811/http://1017.songtrellisopml.com/whatsbeenwroughtusingpiecetables

)

WordPerfect doesn't. Not ever.

So, lawyers stuck with it until well into the WinXP era.

Another boat that WP missed, therefore.


> > Sadly, its management were both desperate and gullible.
>
> And, one has to add, ignorant.

Can't entirely disagree.

They were also Mormons, I think. Any particular connection there may
or may not be is left as an exercise to the reader.

> > And it did a Linux version of the whole WP office suite, by porting it
> > to WINE -- it recompiled the whole suite on winelib and then fixed the
> > bits that didn't work right.
>
> IMHO that was a mistake. It slowed it to a crawl and introduced
> dependencies that it didn't need.

Yes, agreed, but it _was_ an early legitimisation of both Linux and
indeed of WINE.

Also, it was how Mac Office was produced for quite a long time,
possible still, and what made it work was the combination of hardware
speed improvements, Mac OS X and some cosmetic polish, rather than any
big technical backtrack.

MS Word 1 through to 5 were native Mac apps.

6 and later were from a single code base -- in other words, they were
effectively Windows ports. Microsoft ported its class libraries to
MacOS and that enabled a large amount of Windows code re-use.

I think some of the code in Word for DOS might be traceable back to
Visual BASIC for DOS. It has the same look-and-feel. I suspect Word 6
for DOS was a pig too, but nobody noticed at the time and now any DOS
app runs like lightning on a modern PC.

> > But then, some gullible idiot at HQ thought that the problems of WP
> > Office on Windows were that it didn't have the same style of buttons
> > and the same macro language as MS Office. (This, I think, is obvious
> > nonsense.)
>
> Same macro language I can't argue with: compatibility was an issue.

True.

But the cost was too high.

If you use a whole different office suite, you probably don't really care.

> Same style of buttons is exactly the kind of thing you can fool gullible
> marketing people with, though.

Agreed.

> What they failed to understand was that very influential technical
> people -- almost all of them with a background in the UNIX/Linux field
> -- would have killed for a functioning Linux wordprocessor and would
> gladly have been very vocal in praising it. Trashing WP8 for Linux was a
> marketing gaffe of the first order.

Yes yes yes. So much yes.

> > But I never personally liked it much. It wasn't CUA-compliant, and I
> > found the multiply-overloaded F-key UI to be hard to use. I could use
> > it, but I didn't like it.
>
> I actually hated it.

OK, OK, me too. I was attempting to be a bit tactful.

> > However, for its time, WP 4.2 was a classic app. Blindingly fast, the
> > best printer support in the industry, used everywhere, and powerful.
>
> Rivalled only at the time by PC-Write, whose printer support was equally
> good, and it supported proportional-width fonts. But it was shareware,
> and businesses didn't understand it.

That I did not know. I dabbled experimentally with it, no more.

> > WP 5.0 was a big buggy but for many people, WP 5.1 was the classic
> > version. I personally preferred it,
>
> By this time I was using Pandora, the typesetting industry's fork of WP
> for DOS, which could Save As...SGML and had the best tables editor in
> the business. Plus the marching display of tags in the footer, so that
> you knew where in the document you were, structurally. That folded when
> Elsevier switched to XML and made their typesetters find software
> themselves.

I didn't know that one, but I only encountered XML professionally from
2014 onwards.

I am *not* a fan.

> > But an early hero of mine, later a friend, the late great Guy Kewney,
> > wrote of WP 5:
>
> Good grief. I remember Guy from his time at PCW, one of the funniest and
> most literate guys you could meet. I believe your quote is accurate.

Yes, absolutely. Lovely chap. Bowel cancer got him but he faced it
with remarkable bravery and fortitude.

I was very proud that he occasionally phoned or emailed me for tech advice.

> >> They were told in no uncertain terms what to do, and chose to
> >> ignore it, alas.
> >
> > Well, not AIUI... along with Lotus, WordPerfect Corp was one of the
> > 2 big players who bought into the OS/2 dream.
>
> Sorry, I didn't make it clear I was talking about their SGML/XML editor.
> Another instance of having a really excellent product and junking it
> right at the moment it would have been a killer app.


Oh, I see! Well, I can't comment as I never saw it -- but I much
admired your write-up there -- but since the idea occurred to me
recently, I suspect it was probably pretty good.


> The only other
> product to rival that was Microsoft's SGML Author for Word, which,
> despite the name, was a conversion program, not an editor. They killed
> it just as people started to ask for conversion from Word to XML and
> back because it could convert to "real" SGML, not the stuff you find
> inside a .docx file these days. But that's a whole other story.

Well, yes... :-)

I am still learning to produce clear, readable DocBook, thanks in part
to some occasionally-crunchy feedback from my more expert colleagues.
-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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