perfidy

Like many people who use computers, I was once a habitual Microsoft basher. Complaining endlessly of the faults and manifest stupidities of Windows and Office seemed at the time a perfect way to waste an afternoon. The foibles of word processors and other office applications are important to me in my work, because I am of necessity a "power use." - my day to day work requires me to make more than typical use of the capabilities of a word processor.

Then, a new position at a new agency forced me to use WordPerfect. I feel, to this day, that that version of WordPerfect is the most gawd-awful, user-hostile, clumsy and thumb-fingered abomination a major software company has ever foisted on a gullible public. At every turn, WP foiled my every intention with obscure commands, unwieldy interfaces, and random behavior. Nothing in WP was easy. Making a template took days of my time and years off my life from repressed aggravation. I learned - and quickly - to hate WP with a blue passion.

A coworker who had long ago swallowed whatever vestiges of pride remained to him, defended WP. The only coherent points he could make were that a) It's not Microsoft, and b) It's got this nifty reveal codes feature. As for the first argument, I am not about to willingly stab myself eighty times in the chest just to avoid the use of a Microsoft product. If the serfs at Redmond can manage to make a usable product that does not leave me wanting to don a sackcloth tuxedo and rub ashes in my hair, well by damn I'll use it. Corel couldn't manage that trick, so eff them sideways.

As for the second argument, I found this to be the most stunning example of well, not circular reasoning - more of a kind of retarded death spiral reasoning. Reveal codes is, indeed, an essential feature for using WP. The reason why it is essential is that the software is incapable of managing markup by itself. Now, imagine that you are a software gnome. You job is to grab the words from the writer as they fly off the keyboard. Not too difficult, right? Oh, wait, he backspaced! Well, throw those letters away. You are qualified to be Notepad.

Now imagine that you are Wordpad. Occasionally, you are asked to mark certain parts of the typing as being "10 point" or "Times New Roman" or "Bold." Again, not too terribly difficult. If they overlap, fine. Sometimes, you will be asked to remove the markup. Great job, Mr. Gnome.

The gnome who got promoted to be WP is apparently so confused by all the other nifty stuff he's been asked to do, that he can't handle simple things like formatting codes. If you italicise something it marks it, in a manner similar to HTML. But if you de-italicise it, rather than remove the first set of codes, it just puts "de-italicise" markers around the italicised text. Make more than a few changes, and the whole thing becomes very screwy, very quickly - especially if any sort of even mildly complicated formatting is in use.

All these nested markers mean that changing one of them can make the whole document different. Which is why the "reveal codes" function was so very, very, important. You had to be able to see the codes in order to fix the mess that the software itself created. Feggh.

The reason I bring this up is that the new version of WordPerfect has been released. Among its many features are:

In addition to PDF import, Corel WordPerfect Office X3 offers features including, a new email client, a fresh new user interface, new online resources, enhanced multilingual character support and the ability to easily eliminate hidden metadata. These new capabilities are complemented by the suite's RealTime Preview, context-sensitive toolbars, and task-oriented wizards. [emphasis mine]

Do you think that that might have anything to do with the problem I described? For their sake, I hope so, because unless they fixed that problem, the software will still be crap no matter how many other changes they made.