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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

My start in the world of urban work environments was an office temp. Oddly enough I got pretty good at using Word Perfect and was given free training for more features and stuff by one of the top temp agencies at the time, and then I got to work the "lobster" shift at lawfirms and banks.

Word Perfect for DOS has a ton of features that folks normally wouldn't know about like redlining and all kinds of fancy image rendering things (sorry it was > 25 years ago and I can't recollect specifics), law firms had an entire version-control system integrated with it.

Word Perfect was also how I ended up being an actual programmer for money in NYC. I started automating my work at some of these firms with macros and later with some C and Perl code and some of the gigs I had I could just walk in and spend all day on IRC while I'd get paid $20 an hour (which was a lot) for my scripts to run through all the docs they thought I was re-formatting by hand.

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Reveal Codes was the single greatest feature of WordPerfect - I'm convinced Microsoft continues to refuse to provide the equivalent out of spite for WP.

Does anyone else remember calling into WP tech support during its heyday? They had a hold queue disk jokey that would interact with people on hold. It was a nice touch.

I think the DJ role rotated amongst the support staff. At least that's what I told happened in the UK (Source: worked for Lotus Support, nearly worked at WP).

Thanks for bringing up the DJ. I remember that but what company had it. You could also have convinced me I dreamed it.

edit: googled it and found an article from 1991 on what looks like a local news site. https://www.deseret.com/1991/7/17/18931236/don-t-hang-up-dee...

Oh yeah! WordPerfect came out of some offices up the road in Orem.

ALT+F3! That works a lot better on the original Model F keyboards where the function keys were in two columns on the left side of the keyboard. I would love to have a modern version with 12 function keys on the left ...

They exist but are expensive and tend to only be on sale for short periods of time in group guys, for example the Rama Zenith

https://ramaworks.store/products/zenith-keyboard

The Kinesis Freestyle Edge has 12 such keys in that position. The mechanical gaming version (RGB) allows them all to be arbitrarily mapped, and function keys are one good use of them.

Thanks - both your suggestion and @davewongillies are close ... but my ideal keyboard is still the "87 key" layout with the inverted T, but with 12 function keys on the left. On modern PCs it's hard to live without the F11 and F12 keys.

I'd even settle for a 12 key keypad on the left as well - that might be more doable. Looks like I might have to build this myself from scratch ...

What do the F11 and F12 keys do for you on a modern PC? I don't know of their uses offhand.

F11 is often fullscreen, and F12 is sometimes a screenshot button in some games.

Full screen and dev tools respectively for web developers.

If using a debugger with Visual Studio-type keyboard shortcuts, F11 = step in, Shift+F11 = step out.

If running under the Visual Studio debugger, you can also press F12 with the debuggee in focus to break into the process.

I use F12 several dozen times per day because it is the "Save as..." shortcut in MS Office. Much better and quicker than navigating the menus

There are a few commercial keyboards out there that offer this. I was going to suggest the Logitech G110 that I use, but it appears that model's no longer manufactured. Still, there are others.

Reveal codes really is the number one thing I miss in every word processing software since WordPerfect. Fortunately I rarely have to do word processing anymore, but I’d hate to do it as a full time job without reveal codes.

The reason reveal codes isn't available in Word isn't some kind of petty spite. Word just doesn't intersperse formatting codes in the stream like WordPerfect did (or html does, to some extent). It puts all formatting information in a binary block at the end of each paragraph. That's both more flexible, and more fragile.

As an aside, me and my wife, we translated WordPerfect 6 for DOS into Latin for the Vatican, as freelance translators.

This is the important factor. The Word format’s stream isn’t declarative, like WordPerfect’s is; instead it is imperative.

In other words: WordPerfect is like HTML, Word is like CSS.

WordPerfect definitely has styles, so in a way WordPerfect is like CSS. Whatever Word is it has always been a little broken, and remains a little broken to this day. When a document gets large weird style behavior creeps in and makes the editing slightly non-deterministic. With the lack of "reveal codes" like Wordperfect always had, the result is kind of miserable. If I were King for a day...

To continue the analogies, think of silverware and related instruments.

Notepad and TextEdit are like plastic utensils. They do the job (albeit not very well) and you can't really mess up.

Word, Pages and WordPerfect are like regular forks and knives. Not too much harder to use although they do require a bit more discipline.

TeX (and its derivatives/predecessors - Troff, Eqn, Grap) are like scalpels. Extremely powerful, but if you mess up, it can be hard to recover.

This doesn't even get into the fact that the last category must be compiled into a document, and making sure that everything gets into the funnel can be a real challenge for the uninitiated.

> As an aside, me and my wife, we translated WordPerfect 6 for DOS into Latin for the Vatican, as freelance translators.

Come on, now. You can't just throw this out on a tech nerd forum and not explain. What exactly do you mean "translate"? As in, you translated all the menus and help text into Latin, or you helped them integrate good tools for writing in Latin? More details, please. :)

We took the text, and translated it into Latin, so there was a Latin version of WordPerfect for use in the Vatican. Only the user interface, not the dictionaries or things like that. After all, a cardinal is supposed not to need dictionaries to write proper Latin.

I'm a little bit confused by this. Isn't the modern docx format just a bunch of XML markup in a zip file?

Actually, I'm sure the modern docx format is just a bunch of XML markup. I just created a toy docx with the text "This is a test." and ripped it open with a little bit of python that I had lying around from previous experiments along those lines[1]

Looking at the output of the file 'word/document.xml', in relevant part, we see:

  <w:body>
      <w:p w14:paraId="64E164D6" w14:textId="77777777" w:rsidR="00EB525B" w:rsidRPr="00E02EE2" w:rsidRDefault="00E02EE2">
        <w:r>
          <w:t xml:space="preserve">This </w:t>
        </w:r>
        <w:r>
          <w:rPr>
            <w:i/>
            <w:iCs/>
          </w:rPr>
          <w:t>is</w:t>
        </w:r>
        <w:r>
          <w:t xml:space="preserve"> a test.</w:t>

which looks like the underlying XML representation indeed intersperses formatting codes in the stream, at least in part---certainly it's clear that the "is" is italicized"...

That seems like enough information to build reveal codes out of...

[1] https://github.com/paultopia/dedocx/blob/master/deconstruct....

> They had a hold queue disk jokey that would interact with people on hold. It was a nice touch.

That sounds pretty cool. Can you tell us more? How did the DJ interact? Could you choose your music style and get different music like some phone systems offer these days? Was there a live DJ like you’d find in a club for the whole time they were taking calls?

I wish reveal codes would be implemented in other word processing systems. Since docx is zipped xml it would seem like it could be done by someone.

I don't know why everybody thinks Microsoft Word doesn't have Reveal Codes. They have it; it's called Reveal Formatting; it has mostly been there since version 1.0 which I remember installing from 100 floppy disks in college in 1989.

I remember trying this when my dad bought a Windows PC with Word 2.0 (or something), so I could use that instead of his work laptop with WordPerfect. I do remember finding it really didn't work as well, though I don't remember exactly why any more.

This isn't a great response, I know. It's just a data point for the theory that Word and WordPerfect are comparable in this respect.

(This is going back so long ago now. I was still at school! Maybe the problem was that you still had to interact with the GUI view to fix things? So you could still end up with the usual weird Word stuff, but no way to fix it, because you couldn't get right in there and just manually shuffle the codes around like you could with WP.)

Word's "Reveal Formatting" just shows tabs, spaces, and carriage returns as distinct symbols iirc.

Wordperfect's "Show Codes" tells you every attribute and layout change inline.

For example, if bolded some text, Word would just bold it. Wordperfect would insert a symbol like [bold] and the text would be plain, instead of rendering it. Removing the code symbol would change the attribute from the text. This allowed you do to format documents for printing on a system that couldn't handle displaying them fully formatted interactively.

While MS Word does have Reveal Formatting, it is really not a good replacement for Reveal Codes. It's a clunky way to see isolated formating for a short portion of text. For example, how to search for all places in the text for a font change, or margin change, or section format change. It's difficult to also show where certain formatting starts or stops. Under WP, you can instantly scan the entire document looking for those changes. Not so with MS Word. That being said, RF is better to compare 2 sections of text to immediately show their differences.

Lawyers of a certain generation all mourn the loss of WordPerfect terribly, mostly because of reveal codes. I remember using it in law practice as late as 2006.

I still miss Reveal Codes. It was such a fast route to fixing layout problems..

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