Running WordPerfect in DOSEMU

[Mourningdove]

A few weeks ago, I posted that I was having trouble installing DOSEMU, and the result was this fascinating thread.

Life got in the way, and it was a couple of weeks before I could use this knowledge. I installed WordPerfect 5.1+. It loads, but WordPerfect is dependent upon a lot of [Alt] and [Ctrl] keystrokes (if you're as old as me, you'll probably remember all those things!), and none of them work. I can do F7 to exit WordPerfect, but it is unresponsive to, for instance, Ctrl-F8 (page setup) and Alt-F9 (merge codes)

My .dosemurc file is identical to the ones in other distributions I have on the various computers here on which I've enabled DOSEMU (Mandriva and Ubuntu), and so are my FreeDOS autoexec.bat and config.sys files. WordPerfect for DOS works well in those distros (better than it ever did in a Windows box), but unfortunately not in Pardus.

Any ideas?

Edit: I edit the URL correctly.

[Mhmrcs]

I'm sorry, but why do you choose to use WordPerfect? AbiWord takes up very little RAM if thats your primary concern, and OpenOffice provides a wide range of packages in a complete suite.

[Mourningdove]

Why WordPerfect?

1. I've been using it since 1990 and know it inside and out.
2. Reveal Codes: without any question, the finest way to fine-tune and repair formatting.
3. Mail merge that works, much more versatile than that found in OpenOffice.
4. Absolutely customizable. I created a custom keyboard that turned WordPerfect into an editor for a very quirky version of SGML that my workplace was using for everything. Nobody else in the world could have typed their own name in it, but all I had to do was switch back to another standard keyboard to allow the rest of the human race (or at least Ms. Mourningdove) access to my computer.
5. In those 18 years, I might have lost two documents due to corruption. We've got WordPerfect 5.1 files that have survived two network servers, four or five standalone PCs, and more printers than I can even count, and are still perfectly readable. I wish .odt was as stable as .wpd, but sadly, that hasn't been my experience.
6. For automating tasks with macros, PerfectScript is a lot easier than OpenOffice Basic, at least for me; it also allows for cascading menus that make literally hundreds of keystroke combinations possible.

To be fair, then, why not WordPerfect?

1. Because the file format hasn't changed since about 1992, even the most recent versions of WordPerfect can't do Unicode, and texts that use a lot of international characters aren't going to go into other formats well.
2. The ownership has been unstable for years. Microsoft tried very hard to put WordPerfect out of business; they didn't succeed, but they came close, and got quite a lot of help from some of WordPerfect's various leadership teams.

WordPerfect 6.2, for DOS, might have been the best piece of office software ever written. The fact that they worked so hard to make it so close to perfect while the rest of the world was running to Windows tells you a lot of what you need to know about the company, but that doesn't change the fact that it is incredibly good.

[Mhmrcs]

Thats a very compelling argument for WordPerfect, I'm sorry I can't help you, I know nothing about it. But I'll fill out a bug report for you.