Having a word processor on your FreeDOS machine is certainly a very important issue. Former DOS users might still have a box of floppies containing once purchased programs.
In case you are not so lucky, or you could not be bothered keeping obsolete stuff, sometimes on get lucky, very lucky indeed.
Searching the internet about ways to legally obtain old DOS programs, here is a gem: MS WORD directly from Microsoft:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/WIN98/EN-US/Wd55_ben.exe
The file is a PKSFX archive which self-extracts to the active directory. It creates a bunch of EX$, CS$, PR$ and so forth files. Some of the printer driver files appear to have long names, since I am not running DOSLFN.COM, I got a few warnings.
SETUP.EXE lets you install Microsoft Word 5.5A for DOS on your HDD in a directory of your liking. Nothing to report about that process, other than to manually edit the PATH settings in FDAUTO.BAT yourself, since the installer modifies AUTOEXEC.BAT, which is not relevant in FreeDOS.
Text and VGA modes work perfectly fine. Playing with both, I settled on using the graphics mode with 30 lines and 80 columns. 34 lines looked still OK on the screen, so maybe I will switch to that later. 43 lines looks pretty painful and 60 lines, while still working fine, feels pretty squeezed and unnatural.
Concerning printing, I mentioned the problem with the long file names before. I no longer have any of those printers. In order to have something for WORD to think about concerning fonts, I chose the POSTSCRIPT driver.
However, printing is not my main objective using the netbook on FreeDOS. I will create files, e.g. DOC, which will then be transferred to the cloud and used as such. Another option would be to write Postscript files and convert those in PDF.
