Chapter 8. WordPerfect For Linux

Back in the days before Corel Corporation owned WordPerfect—in fact, before Novell owned WordPerfect, if you can remember that far back—WordPerfect was known as the best, most full-featured word processing program available.

WordPerfect, of course, is still giving Microsoft Word a run for its money in the Windows world. Some WordPerfect features—such as its table-handling abilities—are greatly superior to Word's capabilities in the same area. However, under Windows, which word processor you think is better is ultimately a matter of individual opinion.

The good news is that a world-class word processing program, Corel WordPerfect 8, is available for use with Red Hat Linux 6. Once you install WordPerfect, you'll have every word processing feature that you'll conceivably need. You'll find WordPerfect on the Linux platform incredibly easy to use. For one thing, you can open and save documents in Microsoft Word format—as well as documents created in most common word processors. (For more information, see the sidebar "Importing and Exporting Documents.")

In this chapter, you'll learn how to obtain and install Corel WordPerfect. In addition, I'll show you how to use some of WordPerfect's advanced features.

You should understand that—unlike Linux, Gnome, or KDE—Corel WordPerfect is neither open source nor available under the GNU General Public License. Rather, Corel has decided to make a "personal" edition of WordPerfect available free of charge, provided you register it with WordPerfect. In this chapter, I'll show you how to do so. You should note that the personal edition of WordPerfect for Linux lacks some of the features of the commercial edition, primarily a large font library and the ability to access online help.

Note that Corel WordPerfect for Linux will run just as happily under KDE as under Gnome.