Swiss Army Knives and Explosive Documents

By Lawrence I. Charters

Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 16, no. 5, May 1994, pp. 18.

There are a great many things you can do with a word processor, and only some of them involve traditional word processing. File conversion and database preparation are particularly challenging, and rewarding, tasks for word processors.

Microsoft Word, because of its dominance in the Mac world, has relatively few file conversion options. Since it is the “standard,” Microsoft apparently feels that the rest of the world should handle Word’s formatting, and why worry about anyone else’s?

WordPerfect, in contrast, assumes the user will regularly translate files back and forth, and have direct and indirect translation of a much richer range of file formats. Direct translation, in this regard, means built-in support; indirect translation is through Claris’ XTND technology.

Word 5.1 can read Word, MacWrite, MacWrite II, text, Paint, PICT, EPS, TIFF, Excel, WordPerfect DOS 5.0/5.1, and WordPerfect Mac 2.0 documents. It can save in Word, text, RTF, Mac Write, Mac Write II, Word for DOS, Word for Windows, WordPerfect DOS 5.0/5.1, and WordPerfect Mac 2.0 formats.

WordPerfect Mac 3.0 can read MacWrite, Word, WriteNow, DCA, WordPerfect DOS 4.2/5.0/5.116.0, and WordPerfect Mac 2.0 documents, plus Paint, PICT, EPS, TIFF, QuickTime, PCX and DrawPerfect (WPG) graphics. It can save in WordPerfect Mac 2.0/3.0, RTF, text, and WordPerfect DOS 5.0/5.1/6.0. However, through theXTND technology, this list of options opens considerably. On my system, in addition to these options, it can also handle Apple Works, Claris Works, Microsoft Write, Microsoft Works, and even WriteNow for NeXT. The exact XTND formats available will depend on what other software you might have; WordPerfect 3.0 does not come with any XTND filters in the package.

In the “real world” of day to day operations, WordPerfect Mac 3.0 is the only Mac word processor which can reliably handle WordPerfect DOS files, and the only one that can read WordPerfect 6.0 files at all. While Microsoft Word can read WordPerfect DOS files (except 6.0), it. doesn’t necessarily read them completely, or correctly. Tables, indents, tabs and margins are routinely trashed, probably because of the vastly different way in which WordPerfect handles such features.

Microsoft Word also has a major bug which hinders translations: if you have “a lot of fonts;” defined by Microsoft as more than 128, reading or writing WordPerfect documents will usually result in a fatal error. Since most Mac users don’t have 128 fonts, this isn’t a major problem, right?

Wrong. According to Microsoft, Times 9, 10, 12, 14, 20, and 24, plus Times Italic 9, 10, 12, 14, 20 and 24 combine for a total of 12 fonts — not two. So if you have the bit-mapped versions of all 35 standard Laser Writer fonts, in all the usual sizes, you have more than 128 fonts – and Microsoft Word will bomb if you try to translate documents to or from WordPerfect. The only way around this, according to Microsoft technical support, is to get rid of the “excess fonts” – an outrageous “solution.”

While WordPerfect Mac has a clear advantage in file translation, the translation is not always. perfect. One test file, a WordPerfect 5.1 file prepared on a DOS machine had ten tables, and each table, plus every cell in the table, was bordered by a box. When this was brought into WordPerfect on the Mac, the converted file was filled with a symbol for an “unknown” character, rendering the tables unreadable. Even worse, the text had been defined as 1 pt. Geneva and WordPerfect resisted every effort to change this to something more· manageable.

But for the most part, WordPerfect does a better job of file translations than Word. It is also the only program on the Mac that can read DrawPerfect graphics, opening up a huge world of new and different clip art tucked away on MS-DOS bulletin boards.

Because of its outstanding table formatting and sort functions, it is also ideal for· preparing files. for importation into· databases. Among other things, WordPerfect can do multi-column sorts, ascending or descending, alphanumeric or numeric. In comparison, Word can do a single column, alphanumeric, ascending sort – and nothing more.

Word processors, however, are not replacements for database programs. As a test, the “tcsfiles.txt” file from the TCS, a tab-delimited listing of every file on the TCS bulletin board, was loaded into both WordPerfect and Word. Each was then asked to turn the text into a table, and neither one could comply.

Of course, 5,500 lines of text, with eight fields per line, does tend to make a rather large table.