ChiWriter
ChiWriter was a commercial scientific text editor under MS-DOS , programmed in 1986 by Cay Horstmann. It was one of the first WYSIWYG editors suitable for math formulas , even on the IBM PC XT computers that were popular at the time.
The editor was more geared towards speed and interactive editing than a good presentation of the results. It had its own graphical interface with fixed-width bitmap fonts . Although it was popular (it seemed easier than TeX to many scientists ), this led to its demise when editors with vector fonts under MS Windows began to emerge; In 1996 its further development was stopped.
The basic idea of ChiWriter was that every normal line could have an additional line in superscript and subscript, which could also contain text. The extra lines were treated as part of the normal line. This could be used for superscript and subscript characters and also for more complex formulas or fractions . In combination with the ability to use several fonts at the same time (up to 20), e.g. For example, the Greek alphabet , Cyrillic alphabets and mathematical or other symbols, it was quite easy to create mathematical texts in ChiWriter. Each font was the same fixed size, but different sets could be used for different output devices (e.g. low resolution for screen display, high resolution for print output). Sometimes large symbols (such as integral symbols) could be composed of characters that represented symbol parts.
The editor was very customizable. There was also a magazine editor who allowed the modifying fonts and creating your own fonts (including proportional fonts ) and symbols.
Web links
- Horstmann: ChiWriter FAQ
- ChiWriter and user applications