What kind of improvements can you expect from a four-tenths-of-a-point upgrade? The answer, in the case of Novell's WordPerfect 3.5, is a handful of unrelated refinements and additions, from envelope printing to HTML editing. But just what do these scattershot changes amount to, and are they worth the cost of upgrading?
One of the program’s most useful improvements is the new Print Envelope command, which automatically addresses an envelope and places your return address in the corner... Alternatively, you can choose deliver and return addresses from pop-up lists ot user-defined entries or enter them manually. You can also generate zip code bar codes and other standard postal markings and print multiple envelopes with a single merge command.
Also new is WordPerfect’s text-to speech function, which uses Apple's PlainTalk and MacinTalk to read text aloud. The ruler and button bars have undergone minor but thoughtful cosmetic changes as well. And the new Make It Fit command simplifies the format juggling required to move a dangling line or two onto the previous page. Make It Fit asks which of six parameters (font size, line spacing, and the four margins) you're willing to alter, then takes care of the rest.
Although touted as new, the 80 or so document templates in 3.5 really aren't — they just improve on 3.1's Document Experts. Some are overkill, a few are real time-savers, and others are a godsend to the design-impaired.
Bookmarks and Hyperlinks
Higher on the usefulness scale are the new bookmarks and hyperlinks. The bookmarks are easy to create and let you jump quickly around a document Inselecting a tag from a pop-up list on the bookmark ruler. But unless you format each one manually, the bookmarks themselves are invisible in the document. Hyperlinks, on the other hand, are clearly marked by blue, underscored type (the standard World Wide Web format for a link). Although you can also select hyperlinks from a pop-up list, they function best as clickable, in-text buttons that instantly send you elsewhere in your document (or to a different document) or run a WordPerfect macro.
New HTML Editor
WordPerfect 3.5's most notable change is that it lets you create World Wide Web pages using HTML (HyperText Markup Language). You can now select many HTML codes from pop-up menus in a new HTML ruler. You can also specify Web-page titles; choose text, link, and background colors; insert graphics; add page dividers; and assign Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to hyperlinks. As you work, you see a fairly ordinary WordPerfect display that is neither raw HTML code nor the actual Web page. A Preview button switches you to the Web browser of your choice (Netscape Navigator 1.1N is included) so you can see how the page will look with that browser; unfortunately, there's no convenient way to edit the HTML code.
Beginners beware: the documentation explains almost nothing about HTML, its implementation in WordPerfect, or which WordPerfect formats translate into HTML. Experienced Web users will be pleased to know that WordPerfect automatically converts tables into HTML code (though it does this imperfectly). You won't be happy to hear that you have to enter HTML code manually to create forms, that WordPerfect lists don't convert to HTML lists, and that there’s no easy way to convert existing WordPerfect styles into HTML formats. Overall, WordPerfect's HTML editor is far less versatile than the new breed of Web authoring tools.
The Last Word
In Macworld's most recent high-end word processor roundup (“Word Processing Powerhouses," March 1995), I noted that although Microsoft Word 6.0 is an unwieldy, exasperatingly sluggish behemoth, it easily surpassed WordPerfect 3.1 in the breadth and depth of the features serious writers need. Unfortunately, with its limited changes and improvements, WordPerfect 3.5 leaves intact most of 3.1's major shortcomings (for example, no outliner, no character styles, no true glossary, and weak search-and-replace) along with many of its less serious warts (such as the inability to split a window and its sometimes screwball scrolling). On the other hand, WordPerfect retains the clean, uncluttered interface for which it is justifiably famous; new import filters make it more convenient to use with pagelayout programs; and the list price is about half what it was a year ago. If you need a new word processor and don’t require Word 6's high-end features, WordPerfect deserves more serious consideration than ever before. If you have WordPerfect 3.1, however, and don’t really need bookmarks, hyperlinks, or envelope printing, you might want to skip this version. And if you're serious about HTML editing, consider Adobe’s PageMill instead; it costs only slightly more than upgrading to 3.5 (registered upgrades are $59; competitive upgrades are $89).
Eckhardt, Robert C. (February 1996). WordPerfect 3.5. Macworld. (pg. 61).
Novell, Inc.
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wp-35-novell.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
