Daily Archives: April 18, 2008

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WordPerfect X4: not good at PDF, OOXML, ODF import

3 Comments

I don’t envy anyone trying to sell a WordProcessor or Office Suite that is neither Microsoft Office, nor free. Corel has just released WordPerfect X4, which it is promoting as a PDF editor. Both Open Office and Microsoft Word 2007 can save in PDF format, but WordPerfect can open PDFs as well. That could be a handy feature, though PDF was conceived as an output format so arguably it is not a big deal. In any case, you may be less keen on the idea once you read online help, as opposed to the marketing blurb, which explains that WordPerfect does not preserve the formatting of most PDF documents. If it’s an honest PDF, you get something editable but possibly different:

The layout in the imported PDF may be different from the layout in the original PDF, but you can still modify text strings and create a new document without having to copy or redesign all the elements.

If the PDF contains images of text, WordPerfect uses OCR to scan the images and generate editable text. Again, that could be handy, but if you think you can use WordPerfect to open an incoming PDF, make a few changes, and send it on its way, think again.

Let me add that all my attempts to import a PDF into WordPerfect have failed. I installed the trial, and tried to open the first PDF I came across – a 20 page Forrester report. WordPerfect whirled way at 25% CPU and using over 1GB RAM (I have lots installed), eventually offering a blank document. I tried again, and it crashed. Finally, I started a new document, typed the word “Test”, and exported it to PDF. Then I tried to open it in WordPerfect – nothing. It opens fine in Acrobat. I guess something is broken in my install.

Personally I am more interested in its support for OOXML (or possibly OXML), the native format in Microsoft Office 2007 and the subject of contentious ISO standardization. WordPerfect X4 has the cheek to make itself the default editor for .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx. Again, I opened the first document I came across, which is an 8 page Q&A, very simple, no images. The good news is that it opened. The bad news: plain text became bold, paragraph spacing disappeared, and the result looked worse than the original.

Next, I tried a document with a more complex layout. This is actually a bidding card for use in Duplicate Bridge: you can find similar ones here, but in .doc format – mine was one I had amended and saved as .docx. WordPerfect opened it, but with the layout completely messed up. Graphics were lost. I tried opening the old .doc version. Better, but still not right. It spread the document over 5 pages, a shame when it is meant to be printed on two-sided A4 to make a card. Open Office on the other hand could handle the .doc version nicely; I was impressed.

That gave me an idea for a further torture test. Open the bidding card in Open Office, save in ODF format, which WordPerfect X4 is also meant to support. Now open the .odt in WordPerfect X4. It crashed.

WordPerfect X4 may have all sorts of good points as a general Office Suite, but what about this claim in the press release [PDF]:

File Format Freedom
In addition to its significant PDF enhancements, WordPerfect Office X4 now provides suitewide  compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 files (OOXML) and Open Document Format (ODF) in WordPerfect X4. With PDF-reading software installed on more than 80% of all U.S. PCs (Source: Jupiter Research), WordPerfect Office X4 enables users to collaborate and share files more broadly and more effectively than ever before.

Hmmm.

Update

I did a bit more experimentation. It turned out that the worst case (in terms of messed up formatting) involved a document which had originally been pasted from HTML. I imagine it was a bit of a mess internally, so perhaps one should excuse WordPerfect (though users don’t understand these distinctions). I reconverted a Bidding Card document and this time WP did better. Here are some images. First, a portion of the document in Word:

Now, here’s the doc imported into WordPerfect X4. Not right, but looks fixable:

Here it is in Open Office:

Identical to the Word rendering as far as I can see. Then I saved as .odt and opened in WordPerfect X4:

 

microsoft, vista, windows

Windows Server 2008 is better than Vista, but why?

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Mark Wilson asks:

It seems that, wherever you look, Windows Server 2008 is almost universally acclaimed. And rightly so – I believe that it is a fantastic operating system release (let’s face it, Windows Server 2003 and R2 were very good too) and is packed full of features that have the potential to add significant value to solutions.

So, tell me, why are the same journalists who think Windows Server 2008 is great, still berating Windows Vista – the client version of the same operating system codebase?

The short answer is that Server 2008 delivers new features that customers wanted, whereas Vista delivers new features that Microsoft thought its customers should want. However, it seems there may be more to it than that. Maybe Server 2008 really does perform better than Vista.

According to this post, Server 2008 performs 11-17% faster than Vista SP1, running a couple of benchmarks which test typical client applications. Christian Mohn concurs:

Windows Server 2008 performs better, even with the Aero features enabled, than Vista ever did on the same hardware. To me, this a bit strange, even if a lot of services are still disabled, as the codebase is pretty much the same as Vista.

though Mohn’s example is less scientific: he never ran Vista SP1, and also moved from 32-bit to 64-bit.

Server 2008 has a “Desktop Experience” feature, which installs things like Windows Media Player, Aero GUI effects, and other fluff that doesn’t belong on a server. My assumption had been that once you installed this, Server 2008 would perform in a similar manner to Vista. Apparently this is not the case.

It seems to me there are a few possibilities. One is that Microsoft isn’t being straight with us about this “same codebase” stuff. It would be interesting to analyze the core DLLs and work out which are the same, and which are different.

The second possibility is that there’s stuff in Vista which is not part of the core, nor part of the Desktop Experience, but which slugs performance. If so, it would be great to identify it and turn it off.

The third explanation is that the testers are wrong, and that performance is actually similar. For example, maybe Vista was running a background update or backup during tests. Background processes make it hard to conduct truly rigorous performance comparisons.

I’d like to see Mark Russinovich get his teeth into this. I’m also tempted to try the Server 2008 desktop experiment myself.