WordMARC Composer was a scientifically oriented

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current ...

developed by MARC Software, an offshoot of MARC Analysis Research Corporation (which specialized in high end Finite Element Analysis software for mechanical engineering). It ran originally on minicomputers such as

Prime A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...

and

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...

VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...

. When the IBM PC emerged as the platform of choice for word processing, WordMARC allowed users to easily move documents from a minicomputer (where they could be easily shared) to PCs. WordMARC was the creation of Pedro Marcal, who pioneered work in finite element analysis and needed a technical word processor that both supported complex notations and was capable of running on minicomputers and other high-end machines such as Alliant and AT&T. WordMARC was originally known as MUSE (MARC Universal Screen Editor), but the name was changed because of a trademark conflict with another company when the product was ported to the IBM PC.

Features

In comparison with WordPerfect, WordMARC's formatting metadata was always hidden. This was considered friendlier to novice users, and less likely to result in mangled documents. Although it was billed as a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

system, it did not provide for display of proportional fonts. It did, however allow the use of proportional fonts by adjusting the margins based on the current text size using an estimated average character width in version 1. Primeword v2 had font character width tables, and were given a utility that could generate them from HP font files. Advanced features (for its time) included Document Assembly (maintaining each chapter of a book in separate files and combining them for printing or to produce a table of contents or index), automatic paragraph numbering, footnotes, endnotes, support for mixed fonts, multi-level equations and scientific characters. An early version offered support for Japanese characters. The

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

version of WordMARC supported PostScript.

Company history

In 1999 the company became MSC Software and in May was purchased by MacNeal-Schwendler Corp.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wordmarc Word processors Science software Discontinued software History of software