I am experimenting with LibreOffice to likely switch from WordPerfect due to long-time problems that there’s been no apparent interest to get taken care of after its very strong start in the days of DOS before being bought by Novell first and then Corel who’s had it a while now.
LibreOffice Writer opens/reads WordPerfect documents just fine, mostly. Here are shortcomings that I figured would be helpful to mention so as to make LibreOffice Writer that much more of a kick butt word processing program.
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Bookmarks aren’t recognized, and have to be re-created manually.
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Cross References aren’t recognized, and have to be re-created manually.
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Targets of cross references aren’t recognized, and have to be re-created manually.
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Table Of Contents definition/placement isn’t recognized, and has to be re-done manually.
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Table Of Contents entries aren’t recognized (i.e., the markings of Level 1, Level 2, etc), and so the text has to be re-marked manually.
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User-made styles aren’t recognized and therefore not read into the LibreOffice styles list, and have to be re-created manually.
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Also, here’s some longer-term food-for-thought into the future for LibreOffice. There have been 2 companies that have owned WordPerfect after The WordPerfect Corporation sold it back in the 90’s after WordPerfect became a phenomenal word processor for the DOS operating system and continued its strong loyal following into the world of Windows. The first was Novell, and the 2nd was Corel who’s owned it a while. Neither has cared much about fixing long-time problems or making any truly innovative improvements after that strong beginning. Hopefully this idea coming up would not be an excessive idea for LibreOffice programmers: I think it would be a good idea for a couple of programmers to focus on the import/opening functionality of WordPerfect documents so that LIbreOffice can be an awesomely rock solid alternative to make a hopefully mostly seamless switch from WordPerfect, so that manual conversion work wouldn’t be required, or hopefully no more than very little. The goal of such an endeavor would be to make LibreOffice a desirable switch for people and businesses that have many many WordPerfect documents.
If this is a feasible idea, past versions of WordPerfect are available on EBay and Amazon, and one of the awesome strengths of WordPerfect is that the document format has remained the same over the years regardless of what version is being used. Thus, a document created by WordPerfect For DOS version 6.0 (and maybe 5.1 and 5.0 and 4.2), can be read by WordPerfect 8 For Windows, or WordPerfect X4, or X9, or 2021.