VMS Spiffy Text Editors

[Jack Trachtman]

Does anyone know of any commercial text editors for VMS that are closer to the
Word et al environment and functionality
the way WordPerfect used to be?

[Antoniov.]

Hi,
it's very very difficult. VMS has not graphical feature, you could use DecWindow and X-terminal to this but it's no a good idea (only money spent).
It's better use VMS as network server (pathwork) and use PC client with wordperfetc or other prefferred software.

Bye
Antoniov

[John Gillings]

Jack,

There is a product called DECWrite which is a fully featured document processor, generating SGML. Versions exist for OpenVMS (X windows), OS2 and Windows. Back in the early '90s, it had features and scalability way beyond Word and other competitors. The most recent version I'm aware of is V3.1-17

I believe the product was sold to Touch Technologies. It may still exist, perhaps a Google search will find it? You probably won't have too much trouble finding a kit (see any CONDIST up to 1999), but a license might be tricky.

[Craig A Berry]

Look at either DECDocument or DECWrite:

http://www.ttinet.com/products.html

[Willem Grooters]

I did install DecWrite on a 7.3-1 system (requires XWindows) but found it didn't work: it requires some libraries for printing, that have been removed from the distribution. They do exist on older versions of VMS, I'm not sure from which version I got them, could be back to version 6.x. If you could get hold of these, you can use DecWrite.
However, it's output is by no means compatible with MS Word.

[Ian Miller.]

wordperfect V7.1 can still be bought here http://www.legacy-2000.com/Products/wp71.pdf

[Derek Haining]

I suspect that the libraries that were removed had to do with Display PostScript.
VMS (and Tru64 UNIX) used to support Display PostScript, but I understood that it was removed due to some licensing issues. I seem to remember something about Adobe not wanting to support Display PostScript any longer.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Another possibility is Mozilla ;-). The HTML editor gives you list, various fonts, tables et al.

Plus the generated format is pretty portable.