WordPerfect was for many years the dominant wordprocessor, especially in the MS-DOS period. Reputedly even WP’s own engineers regarded the character-cell version as the real WordPerfect, and superior to the GUI version. However, embedded inside the Windows version (8) was a real, fully-fledged SGML editor and stylesheet system, providing synchronous typographic editing of SGML documents for the price of a wordprocessor, well below the entry-point for the larger SGML-only editors.

Figure 10. WordPerfect compiling a DTD and creating a stylesheet

Compilation requires choosing the correct character map files for whatever is expressed in the SGML Declaration, but otherwise it is fairly tolerant of the settings, and adjusts them to suit itself. This produces what WP calls a logic file, which can then be used to create a stylesheet (template, see Figure 10, “WordPerfect compiling a DTD and creating a stylesheet”) which becomes available along with the document type of the DTD and appears in the wordprocessor’s SGML menu (the normal Open/New functions only work for wordprocessor documents).

Figure 11. WordPerfect editing SGML