sidetone said:
I wonder if a bought license of WordPerfect would run emulated, and how well it would run on FreeBSD. Would it be able to print too?
OJ said:
The most recent WP information that I've found is from this site:
WordPerfect for DOS Updated. I have no experience with running it in an emulator though.
I've been using Corel Word Perfect 6.2 for DOS for about 15 years so far and never got tired of it. Runs very well on dropbox even in graphical mode (dosbox switches autonomously CPU emulation to a 386 processor). I usually take notes on WP putting dosbox at fullscreen. Just make a dedicated configuration file to be run with
dosbox -conf ~/path_to_file/ (thus to avoid also mounting the folder and manually launching the program every time) and give it cycles=max and memsize=32. It's better to keep in mind that dosbox emulates a S3 trio video card, since WP will ask for a proper video driver to install during setup.
A couple of shots:
-
https://i.imgur.com/wvBOLJ2.png
-
https://i.imgur.com/sbhsqZD.png
Files can be printed on FreeBSD with lpr, but to avoid strange characters to be added and printed from time to time (MS-DOS format vs UTF-8), use
converters/unix2dos or open and print it with another office suite.
I really must give
print/scribus a try. Other than that, I'm still a fan of plain text formatted with proper carriage returns
Scribus is awesome, if you have never give a look at it, it's worth a try.I really prefer it over anything else, except for WP, and Pages (yes, pages, please don't hurt me for that).
Abiword on the contrary is something really buggy from my point of view. Never succeeded to get it work correctly on any bsd/linux system, despite all dependency correctly in place.
Anyway, a plain text lover should love
editors/wordgrinder better, as well as
math/sc for spreadsheets, and
misc/tpp for presentations
