{"id":1607,"date":"2010-05-24T00:01:18","date_gmt":"2010-05-24T08:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1607"},"modified":"2013-02-10T13:37:57","modified_gmt":"2013-02-10T20:37:57","slug":"codes-revealed-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1607","title":{"rendered":"Codes Revealed Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the features I miss the most from the old, original WordPerfect was called Reveal Codes. It was a nerd&#8217;s delight, but also a key to cleaning up your text.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nThe original DOS version of WordPerfect was a writer&#8217;s dream. It was a beautiful thing to see, a nearly blank screen \u2014 just like a sheet of paper waiting early in a typewriter.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1610\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/wp-screen.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1610\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/wp-screen.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"wp-screen\" width=\"290\" height=\"217\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1610\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1610\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A recreation of WordPerfect's main screen.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Even in text mode, the beauty of WordPerfect was that you saw only your words. Other word processors of the day distracted you with all sorts of fodder: Microsoft Word for DOS originally had the lower third of the screen gobbled up with a huge menu and other trivial information. WordPerfect was clean.<\/p>\n<p>WordPerfect&#8217;s cleanliness led to some problems, however. When you formatted your text the codes would sometimes get lost. Worse, because the screen was plain text, you couldn&#8217;t really see when you&#8217;ve applied certain text effects or what they were.<\/p>\n<p>The solution to the code clutter was to use the Reveal Codes command. It split the screen so that you could see what was happening in WordPerfect behind the scenes.<\/p>\n<p>For example, below is a recreated screen shot from my <em>WordPerfect For Dummies<\/em>, first edition:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1609\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/fig2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1609\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/fig2-300x149.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"fig2\" width=\"300\" height=\"149\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1609\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/fig2-300x149.png 300w, https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/fig2.png 644w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1609\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Reveal Codes in Action (Click for a larger version)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>See the redundant bold codes in there? They bold nothing, and they could potentially cause a problem in the text. Yet by using Reveal Codes, you can discover where such problems are and easily fix them. After all, trying to delete invisible codes is a toughie \u2014 even for a nerd.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, do you see a similarity between the WordPerfect codes and HTML tags? Very similar.<\/p>\n<p>Even tough the formatting codes seem technical, a lot of WordPerfect users relied on seeing them to best-format their text. In fact, one of the biggest questions I would get from readers of my <em>Word For Dummies<\/em> books was, &#8220;How can I get Reveal Codes to work for Microsoft Word?&#8221; I&#8217;ll answer that question <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1614\">next blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the features I miss the most from the old, original WordPerfect was called Reveal Codes. It was a nerd&#8217;s delight, but also a key to cleaning up your text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-word"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1607"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4153,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1607\/revisions\/4153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}