Some Tweaks for WordPerfect on Linux

Revision 6.0

October 2024

Printing

The main page on WordPerfect 8.1 offers a wrapper to enable the WP Print manager to be invoked on current distros, and thus for printers to be added, modified and deleted. This is now installed by the scripts installing WordPerfect 8.1 as part of the "wp-utils" package.

Although the specific drivers provided by Corel are for older printers, a more recent WP driver may be available from the Columbia University WPdos website. Moreover, good results on monochrome printers may be obtained by using the WP Passthru Postscript driver, or on colour printers with the Columbia University postscript driver for an HP Laserjet Color 4600 printer, when the WP driver is pointed at the CUPS driver for your actual printer. The HP 4600 postscript driver, named "hpc4600p.prs", is included in the wp-utils package on this site, and placed in the "/usr/lib/wp8/shlib10" directory.

It is possible that in some cases the print wrapper may not work. In that case there are several of possible workarounds.

(1) The simplest workaround is to use LibreOffice Writer to print your .wpd document, created or edited in WordPerfect.

To ensure that LibreOffice can access the Type1 fonts used by WordPerfect for Linux, the fonts should be copied from "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1" into "/usr/share/fonts/type1".

(2) An alternative method of printing a WordPerfect file is to save the file in WordPerfect (to a different filename) as a postscript file. Then rename the output file with a .ps extension. Finally send that file to the printer using the Okular program

Importing MS Word document files

WordPerfect 8.1 for Linux cannot directly import document files in recent MS Word .doc or .docx formats.

Such files can be imported via LibreOffice and WordPerfect 12 for Windows. LibreOffice can save a .docx file as a .doc file. And .doc files can be imported via WordPerfect 12 for Windows, which can be used in Linux under the Crossover or Wine compatability layer, and can save the file in .wpd format, so that it can be opened by WordPerfect 8.1 for Linux.

In some cases a .docx or .doc file saved by LibreOffice in .rtf format can be satisfactorily opened in WordPerfect 8 for Linux.

Other solutions to converting .doc or .docx files into the WordPerfect 6.1 .wpd format (which is standard for all versions of WordPerfect from 6.1 onwards, including WordPerfect 8.1 for Linux) are suggested by the Columbia University WPdos site.

Colour Schemes

If you want to use your own colour settings in WordPerfect for Linux on a recent KDE distro, you may need to alter the KDE system settings by disabling the option: "Apply colors to non-KDE4 Applications".

To do this, load System Settings, then Application Appearance, then Colors, then Options. Then switch off the relevant option. You may need to log out and in again to make the WP colours effective.

Unfortunately the said option is not readily available in recent versions of KDE (including the version used in Kubuntu 20.04). But it can be exercised by creating a text file, named "kcmdisplayrc", containing the following lines:

"[X11]

exportKDEColors=false".

The file should be placed in "home/[user]/.config".

This problem does not arise if you use Mate (instead of KDE) as your window manager.

The Euro-Currency Symbol

WordPerfect for Linux 8 was released before the introduction of the euro currency, and does not directly support the euro-currency symbol ("€").

But it is possible in WordPerfect 8 for Linux to view the symbol on screen, and to print the symbol using the passthru postscript driver, if one has edited the WordPerfect 8 font file for typographical symbols, so as to replace the u in a circle, located at 4,72, by a glyph for the euro symbol, copied from another suitable font. The glyph to be copied should have a width of 500.

Such editing can be done using the FontForge program. The file to edit is "wphv04n_.pfb". A suitable source for the euro-currency symbol glyph is "n022003l.pbf", a Nimbus type1 font which may be present on a current Linux installation in "/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts". The symbol appears at position 395 in the Nimbus font.

Such an amended font, created by the present writer, is included in the wp-utils package, available on this site. It is located in "/usr/wp-extras/fonts". It can be copied to the /usr/lib/wp8/shlib10 directory, so as to overwrite the original WP font with the same name.

Menus, Abbreviations and Dialog Boxes

WordPerfect for Linux (unlike some later versions of WordPerfect for Windows) does not enable you to edit its menus. But an additional menu can be created by means of a suitable macro, and this can then be added to the button-bar.

Abbreviations can also be created by means of the QuickCorrect function.

If the menus and dialog boxes are too small for comfort, they can be enlarged by the addition to the xwp command-line such as "-fontSize 20".

Keypad keys

You may find that the Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, Ins, Del and arrow keys on the numeric keypad do not work in WordPerfect for Linux. So a script, named padkeys, created by the present writer, which is designed to set the numeric Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, Ins, Del and arrow keys to emulate the normal Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, Ins, Del and arrow keys, is included in the wp-utils packages available on this site, which install it in "/usr/bin". It may not work well on all keyboards.

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Last updated in October 2024.