As promised, Corel Corporation has posted the powerful WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac Enhancement Pack the Mac on their Website as a free download, here:

http://www.corel.com/products/macintosh/wpmac35/newdownload

Corel announced in July that it would make Corel WordPerfect 3.5 Enhancement Pack for Macintosh available as a free. download. Despite some minor incompatibilities with the latest release of the Mac OS (8.6), Corel believes that WordPerfect 3.5 for Macintosh continues to provide great value to the Macintosh community. Certainly one cannot argue with the value if it's free!

Corel WordPerfect 3.5 Enhancement Pack for Macintosh, released in August, 1997, is the latest version of Corel's WordPerfect, the venerable word processing program that once virtually owned the DOS market, and which was first out of the blocks with a native PowerPC high-end word processor for the Mac.

The downloadable version of WordPerfect 3.5 is a complete product and not just a patch, update or add-on pack to a previous version, and incorporates all updates and patches issued by Corel subsequent to the original product release.

The free download consists of the WordPerfect application and utilities only. Clipart, web art, sounds, templates and some fonts that are included with the full product will not be included in the downloadable package. Customers who wish to purchase the full product on a CD-ROM for $25, or the boxed version with printed manuals for $175, may do so through retailers, Corel Customer Service (1-800-77-COREL) or through Corel eStor until Oct. 29 or until supplies run out.

Corel will only offer technical support for the Mac version of WordPerfect until October 29, 1999.

Corel says that "aging source code" and increasing differences in functionality between the Macintosh and Windows versions of WordPerfect have made it no longer feasible for Corel to enhance or build on the WordPerfect 3.5 Macintosh code base. Therefore, no further versions of WordPerfect for Macintosh will be released based on the 3.5 code base.

That would seem to leave the door open just a crack for a possible new WordPerfect for the Mac at some future date.

While WordPerfect 3 was the first full-featured, PowerPC native, Mac word processing program, it failed to capitalize (in the Mac market) on Microsoft's Word 6 fiasco. Novell sold WordPerfect to Corel Corp. of Ottawa, Canada, in 1996, but Corel wasn't able to crack Word's hegemony either. Even the Canadian Armed Forces, headquartered in Corel's hometown, recently switched from WordPerfect to Word.

WordPerfect development for the Mac essentially ground to a snail's pace with the Corel purchase, which was unfortunate, because WordPerfect is a great word processor -- surpassing Word in some aspects. WordPerfect doesn't include all the bells and whistles that Word does, but its still-impressive feature set comes in a less ponderous, bloated, and overbearing package than Word's.

The current version, WordPerfect 3.5e, is an evolutionary refinement of versions 3 and 3.1 and incorporates features that were to have been included in WordPerfect 4.0. The program's features include customizable tool bars and keyboard shortcuts; a built-in graphics editor; tables; style sheets; a macro language; full Macintosh drag and drop support; an equation editor; envelope printing; bookmarks and hyperlinks within a document or other documents; AppleScript support; WorldScript (foreign language) support; text-to-speech, an HTML editor, a grammar checker, automated tables of contents, on-the-fly spelling correction and watermarks. A "Make It Fit command" automatically reformats documents that are just a little too long to fit on the desired number of pages.

WordPerfect's clean, easy-to-use toolbars use plain-English labels instead of Word's cryptic icons, and a master tool bar allows you to select with a click which other toolbars you want to display. WordPerfect can also import Word documents with stylesheets intact.

WordPerfect 3.5's HTML editor allows you to import HTML documents from the Web and edit them, or to create your own formatted Web pages from directly within WordPerfect without fooling around with manual HTML coding.

Missing in WordPerfect are integrated outlining, character styles, and the extremely useful true glossaries found in Word and Nisus Writer.

WordPerfect uses about 10MB of had drive space -- much less than what Word '98 demands.

Update : I received quite a bit of reader mail about my MV&R Extra on the WordPerfect free download and WordPerfect upgrade patches for earlier versions. It is now established that the free WordPerfect download offered by Corel is "numbered" 3.5e, which I take to mean that it includes at least all upgrades to 3.5.4,and even more.

The proper title of this WordPerfect build is Corel WordPerfect® 3.5 enhanced for Mac OS, which was introduced in October 1997, but is that the whole story?

Reader Alarik Skarstrom doesn't think so. He writes:

Dear Mr. Moore,

You may well receive more than one note like this, so forgive me my probable redundancy.

The WordPerfect Corel is releasing in called WordPerfect 3.5e, where the "e" stands for Enhanced; hence WordPerfect 3.5 Enhanced. This includes all the updaters and patches and indeed more, not otherwise included in patches. If a user applies any of those patches [to the enhanced version] they will inadvertently degrade if not ruin the application.

This application was to have been called WordPerfect 4. In fact, it is called that in various places within the package.

It might be of value to your readers to make it clear that they should not use any of those patches--this version is considerably later than any of those patches. As I said, it was slated to be version 4--in house and elsewhere.

By the way, Macintouch has a page on WP that spells some of this out.

Thanks.

Yours sincerely,

Alarik Skarstrom

Reader Geoffrey Green

Charles:

Version 3.5e is newer than 3.5.4 or earlier. It is very different. I know that from having followed the original release of 3.5e closely, and from what I've seen after downloading and using the product and comparing it to the version of 3.5.4 that I previously owned.

Version 3.5.1 was the last version released while Novell owned WordPerfect. Versions 3.5.2, 3.5.3 and 3.5.4 were primarily bug fix updates. Version 3.5e was an "enhanced" version of WordPerfect that was released in (I believe) mid-1997. It added a substantial number of new features, such as an on-the-fly spell checker and compatibility with the MacOS 8 Platinum appearance. A patch to fix several bugs in 3.5e was released a short time later, but did not modify the version number. When the Corel folks say that the 3.5e free download includes all updates, they are referring to the 3.5e patcher; there are no other updates.

To conclude, the absolute latest version of WordPerfect is the patched version 3.5e now available for free download; all previous versions, including version 3.5.4, are older. Version 3.5.4 cannot be updated to 3.5e.

- geoff

From Gene Van Dyke

In response to the "is WP 3.5e really 4.0?" article, i offer the following email that I have sent around some Mac Forums. I have yet to get a decent answer:

Yesterday, I installed the free WorPerfect 3.5 that Corel just offered. Of course, I wanted to make sure it was worth the trouble before I trashed my WP 3.5.4. I cannot get the "enhanced" version to insert a jpeg graphic. I also could not insert an uncompressed tiff. I could only insert a pict. This makes many of the pictures provided on my original 3.5 installation disk useless. It seems 3.5e loads a converter called "INSO Conversions" (NOT 3.5.4's method). This is then followed by a "conversion resource not found" dialog. I attempted replacing the new converters with the 3.5.4 ones to no avail.

No jpeg import?? If this is an "enhancement", I am the Queen of England.

(I have system 8.1 installed w/ MacLink Plus 9.0.2. I use both Ram Doubler and Speed Doubler (8) on my aging 7200)

Thanks,

Gene Van Dyke

P.S. NO WAY I'm going to report this to Corel at $9.95 per email.

From Steve Smith:

I read the information posted on Applelinks regarding WordPerfect versioning. I thought I'd add my two cents.

Awhile back, I remember reading information that the next version on WordPerfect was to be version 4.0. This was going to be based entirely on OpenDoc technology. Well, we all know how this went. Apple pulled the plug on OpenDoc (even their own internal development of ClarisWorks with OpenDoc). I think Corel got a bit upset about the whole thing (read: no new products for Mac for quite some time). Without OpenDoc, WordPerfect 4.0 would not be much of a release.

They dropped further development. WordPerfect 3.5e was what was left of the dead version 4.0. Corel salvaged what they could and added some free stuff and voila! -- WordPerfect 3.5e Enhanced. I bought the CD direct from Corel when it first was available in 1997. I doubt Corel would admit this now, but it's true. When I installed WP 3.5e, imagine my surprise to find the Finder indicated the document creator as "Corel WordPerfect 4.X". In fact, although they probably fixed this glaring reminder of version 4.0 in later versions, the file format was in fact totally different then 3.5.x. No application supported conversion of this format.

Just this month, fully 2 years later, MacLinkPlus finally has translators for version 3.5.e (a.k.a. 4.0). I think Corel will develop an entirely new version of WordPerfect for Mac OS X. Think about it. They already have WordPerfect for Unix. How difficult could it be to port that to Mac OS X?

Loyal Mac Fanatic,

Steven W. Smith

Editor's note: Apple blindsided Nisus by dropping OpenDoc too, after Nisus had spent a lot of development time and money adapting Nisus Writer to the Open Doc protocols. However, Nisus still enthusiastically supports the Mac platform.

From Clinton Kawanishi

Charles,

I have been running WordPerfect 3.5.4 for some time. I also have a paid for copy (by the U.S. govt) of 3.5e. Using 3.5e to open a PC WP file, saving it, then double clicking it to open it, MacLink 11 comes on and says its a format that was not available at the time the CD (MacLink) was shipped. Interesting.

Clint Kawanishi

Charles W. Moore

.

February 08, 2012