.WPD

Introduction

A .wpd file is a document from WordPerfect, the word processor that led the market on MS-DOS in the late 1980s. WordPerfect has belonged to Corel since 1996 and is still sold, and it remains common in legal offices, especially in North America. Older versions often saved documents with no extension or with one the user chose.

WordPerfect is known for its “reveal codes” view, which shows the formatting codes between the characters of the text, and the file format stores the document the same way.

Structure

Files from WordPerfect 5 onwards start with the bytes FF 57 50 43 (0xFF then WPC), followed by a short header that gives the offset of the document area, the product and file type and the format version. The document area is a stream of text and codes: single bytes for common functions, and longer variable-length groups, each marked by a code byte at its start and end, for things such as fonts, margins, tabs and tables.

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