Word Perfect

[Jouko Lindstedt]

On Tue, 30 May 1995, W. Derbyshire wrote:

>         Interesting that Ernie and others don't seem to be having any problem
> with WP 6.1. I do have problems. I work with both WP 6.1 as well as
> Microsoft Works. For foreign languages I use software called WorldFont.
> The Microsoft Works responds perfectly to that software. WP, on the other
> hand, will not recognize lower case 'ja' in any of the Slavic languages

The point is that WP is in many respects cleverer than "normal" Windows
programs as regards "foreign" character sets: it has separate codes for
more than 1500 different characters. Windows only regocnizes 512
different characters, and each character is coded as a position in a
_particular_font_ (or rather, particular coding, such as Latin-1, Latin-2
or KOI-8 or what not). Changing a font in, say, WinWord, may change your
characters, but not in WP.

The different character philosophy causes WP to be incompatible with many
programs designed to handle special characters in Windows. But in itself
it is usually cleverer than any of these. It took me less than an hour to
design a Russian keyboard for me in WP6.1 for Windows; it works, the
letters print and are visible on the screen. Designing, say, a Czech
keyboard is equally trivial. I didn't even need the manual, the help menu
was sufficient.

This is not to say that there are no bugs or shortcomings in WP. But it
is the sole truly two-byte system available before we get Unicode.

Jouko Lindstedt
Department of Slavonic Languages, University of Helsinki
e-mail: Jouko.Lindstedt at Helsinki.Fi or jslindst at cc.helsinki.fi
http://www.helsinki.fi/~jslindst/