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FAQ
The number one question anyone ever asks 😃
Vim and Emacs are powerful Text Editors, WordPerfect is a Word Processor. The fundamental difference between these two applications is that a Word Processor understands the physical page dimensions and proportional font geometry. If you're concerned with the layout and appearance of the printed page, then a text editor is simply not the right tool for the job.
There is brief a video demonstrating this here.
LaTeX is a Typesetting System, not a Word Processor. Quoting the LaTeX authors:
LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content.
If you are concerned about the appearance and layout of the physical page, then you need a Word Processor.
WordGrinder is more of a "rich text" editor than a conventional word processor, it is designed to be minimal and distraction-free. Conversely, WordPerfect contains many, many powerful features, offering minute control over every aspect of your document.
These are graphical Word Processors that cannot work in a terminal. WordPerfect for UNIX is a terminal application that focuses on efficiency and automation, without sacrificing powerful editing features.
Try Alt+Enter, or if that keybinding is reserved on your system try Esc,Enter.
You can also select Layout > Align > Hard Page from the menu.
The WordPerfect documentation refers to Ctrl+Enter, but for historical reasons many terminals do not differentiate between Enter and Ctrl+Enter.
If you're using XTerm and would prefer to use Ctrl+Enter, you can work around this by adding a setting like this to your .Xresources:
XTerm*vt100.translations: #override \n\
! ^<Key>Return: string("\033\015") \n
To move between columns press Ctrl+Shift+← or Ctrl+Shift+→.
Alternatively, you can use Ctrl+Home followed by the direction of the column you want to move to.
If that still doesn't work, the column might not exist yet. Insert a hard page break in the first column to force the next column to be created, Alt+Enter. You can always remove the break later if necessary, using Reveal Codes to find it.
You must be using a terminal that supports sixels. For example, XTerm, with decTerminalID set to vt340.
See Terminals#Graphics for further instructions.
The DOS versions of WordPerfect used a white-on-blue color scheme by default, whereas the UNIX version uses default colors.
If you prefer the DOS look, set the BG column to all f in File > Setup > Display > Colors.
Note that WordPerfect supports per-document colors. If you want the same colors applied to all documents, press Shift+F3 while on the Color screen.
Enable Bullet numbering, Tools > Define > Bullets, then switch on Outline mode, Tools > Outline > On.
Tip: You can also just enter a bullet (●) character with Ctrl+V,*,*.
No, the Alt- keys are reserved for "Quick Macros", but you haven't defined one.
You can bind them to any function or macro you like. For example, if there is a function you use regularly but it's inconveniently deep in a menu.
Perhaps you like to use bullet points, you could bind them to Alt+B like this:
- Select
Tools > Macro > Define. - Name it
altb, and enterEnable Bulletsas the description. - You should see
Macro Defblinking. Enter Esc=tdbEnterooEnter. - Press Ctrl+F10 to end the macro.
You can now turn on bullets by pressing Alt+B.
Mouse support changes how the PRIMARY selection buffer works in terminals.
This is required so that the terminal can differentiate between a click operation and a clipboard operation. In most terminals, you hold Shift to indicate you are trying to select or paste text.
If you find this an annoyance, there are two options.
- In XTerm you can toggle mouse support on and off at runtime.
Hold Ctrl, then click and hold the right mouse button. Select the Allow Mouse Ops option from the menu.
To disable mouse support by default, add XTerm*allowMouseOps: false to your .Xresources.
- Alternatively, add
export WPTERM=xterm-nomouseto your.bashrc.
There is a macro included in the distribution to achieve this.
Navigate to File > Setup > Keyboard Layout, and select Edit on your layout. If you don't have a layout already, you may need to create one.
Select Retrieve, press " and enter /opt/wp80/wpmacros/tdquotes.wpm.
You should now get typographic quotes, " → “”.
You can optionally repeat the process with these similar macros:
- For typographic single quotes ' → ‛’, select
Retrieve, press ' and enter/opt/wp80/wpmacros/tsquotes.wpm. - For typographic emdash -- → —, select
Retrieve, press - and enter/opt/wp80/wpmacros/emdash.wpm. - For typographic ellipsis ... → …, select
Retrieve, press . and enter/opt/wp80/wpmacros/ellipsis.wpm.
This is because Windows Terminal does not correctly emulate hardware IRM (Insert Replace Mode).
As of this writing, this is fixed in Windows Terminal Preview (available in the Windows Store), but not the stable release.
You can track progress on this bug here.
Yes! You can use mactool, then use any editor you like (vim, emacs, etc).
See Macro Programming.
I've received a few reports of this, the cause is unclear.
Here are a few things to test, multiple users have reported that one of these have resolved the issue.
- If you're using XTerm, try setting privateColorRegisters to false.
- While in the View Document screen, press Shift+F3 twice.
- Try using a black background, the equation editor in particular works better with a dark background.
- In
File > Setup > Display > Colorstry using default colors (a) for all attributes.
You have disabled Background Color Erase, try enabling it with the defbce option.
WordPerfect uses an 800x270 resolution by default. That was a good choice for the DEC VT340 Hardware Terminal, but maybe not so good on a modern terminal emulator.
You can make it bigger or smaller with with grsutil, see Terminals#Graphics.
WordPerfect has limited support for modern graphics formats, but you can convert your files to a supported format with ImageMagick.
It might sound odd, but the best supported bitmap format is XWD, the format used for screendumps by the standard xwd(1) utility.
You can convert any other format to XWD with ImageMagick like this:
$ convert -colors 256 yourfile.png xwd:graphic.xwd
Note: The
-colors 256is important, as WordPerfect will reject anything higher than 8bit color images (lower is fine).
If this is not acceptable because of the reduced color space, you should use Encapsulated Postscript, EPS.
ImageMagick can convert any image format to EPS without any loss in quality, and WordPerfect will pass the data directly to the printer or output file.
You can rotate and scale EPS images in the graphics editor, but it will just show a placeholder image by default.
If you would like to see a preview image in WordPerfect instead of the placeholder, it is possible to add a thumbnail using a command like this:
$ epstool -tg --device tiffgray graphic.eps graphic.eps
If you're trying to create graphs using Lotus 1-2-3, simply save them in .CGM format from the /Graph Save menu, WordPerfect has native support for these files.
From WordPerfect Magazine, June 1990:
Once
End Field(F9) is pressed, WordPerfect thinks that you're creating a secondary file and begins keeping track of how many fields you're creating. To clearField: 1off your status line press Home,Home,↑, then Ctrl+Home twice.
Yes, use Printer Command, Shift+F8,4,6,2.
You can insert a file, or a short string.
This might be useful to include a watermark, special characters, and so on.
The sequence Ctrl+I is indistinguishable from Tab in terminal applications, so it's not possible to bind it to anything other than Tab.
This is also true for Ctrl+J and Enter.
However, there is a workaround.
If you're using XTerm, you could add something like this to your .Xresources
XTerm*vt100.translations: #override \n\
^<Key>I: string("\014")
Note: You can use any other sequence.
The sequences Ctrl+S and Ctrl+Q are a bit different, they're reserved by the terminal driver.
If you don't usually use them, you can simply add stty stop undef and stty start undef to your ~/.profile to make those keys available to applications.
The file is in use, so wp opened it read only. This means that either you or another user has the file open in a different terminal.
WordPerfect uses advisory locks, see flock(2). You can use the standard utility lslocks to see who holds the lock.
If you don't like this feature, it can be disabled by running touch /opt/wp80/shlib10/.WP.NO_FLOCK as root.
WordPerfect works a little differently to other UNIX applications, it assumes you want to manage all your documents in a central directory.
To choose that directory, navigate to File > Setup > Location of Files > Documents.
Note: You can also choose whether you prefer file extensions or not,
File > Setup > Initial Settings > Save/Retrieve with .wp Extension.
- If you specify a relative filename on the command line, WordPerfect will look for a file relative to your Documents directory.
- If you specify an absolute filename, WordPerfect will try to open that exact filename.
Note: An absolute filename must begin with an
/.
The main source of confusion is when you want to open a file in the working directory, and try wp ./file.wp. That is
a relative filename, so WordPerfect will try to open /home/user/Documents/./file.wp.
Instead, you should specify $PWD/document.wp.
You could set your Documents directory to /proc/self/cwd if you don't like this behaviour.
Don't worry, your document is safe - you found an alternate shortcut for Switch, so you simply switched to another document window.
You can either press Shift+F3, or click again to return to your previous document.