Word perfect

Word perfect is a word processing software application own by Corel. It was developed by Brigham Young University for use in Data General minicomputer. The application's feature list was considerably more advanced than its main competitor WordStar, an established program based on the operating system CP/M that failed to transition successfully onto MS-DOS.

WordPerfect gained praise for its look of sparseness and clean display. It rapidly displaced most other systems, especially after the 4.2 release in 1986, and it became the standard in the DOS market by version 5.1 in 1989. Its early popularity was based partly on its availability for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, and also partly because of extensive, no-cost support, with "hold jockeys" entertaining users while waiting on the phone. Its dominant position ended after the release for Microsoft windows and Microsoft office suite.

The common filename extension of WordPerfect document files is .wpd. Older versions of WordPerfect also used file extensions .wp.wp7.wp6.wp5.wp4 and originally, no extension at all.

The first version of WordPerfect for the IBM PC was released the day after Thanksgiving in 1982. It was sold as WordPerfect 2.20. WordPerfect 3.0 was released for DOS. This was updated to support DOS 2.x, sub-directories, and hard disks. It also expanded printer support, where WordPerfect 2.x only supported Epson and Diablo printers that were hard-coded into the main program. Adding support for additional printers this way was impractical, so the company introduced printer drivers, a file containing a list of control codes for each model of printer.

Features of WordPerfect

• extensive use of key combinations e.g ctrl + shift + f9.
• Its "streaming code" file format.
• Macro/scripting capability, now provided through PerfectScript.
• Reveal Codes.
• Numbering of lines as the legal profession requires.
• Mail merge.
• Spreadsheet capabilities.

Code streaming

A key to WordPerfect's design is its streaming code architecture that parallels the formatting features of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. Documents are created much the same way that raw HTML pages are written, with text interspersed by tags (called "codes") that trigger treatment of data until a corresponding closing tag is encountered, at which point the settings active to the point of the opening tag resume control. As with HTML, tags can be nested. Some data structures are treated as objects within the stream as with HTML's treatment of graphic images, e.g., footnotes and styles, but the bulk of a WordPerfect document's data and formatting codes appear as a single continuous stream. A difference between HTML tags and WordPerfect codes is that HTML codes can all be expressed as a string of plain text characters delimited by greater-than and less-than characters , whereas WordPerfect formatting codes consist of hexadecimal values.