ChiWriter

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ChiWriter

1989 ChiWriter text using customer-designed fonts.
Developer(s)	Cay Horstmann
Initial release	1986; 39 years ago (1986)
Operating system	MS-DOS
Type	Text editor
License	Proprietary

ChiWriter is a commercial scientific text editor for MS-DOS, created by Cay Horstmann in 1986. It was one of the first WYSIWYG editors that could write mathematical formulas, even on IBM PC XT computers.

The basic idea of ChiWriter is that a user can add lines above or below the current text line (by half of the base line height), and write text there too. The additional lines are treated as part of the original text line. This can be used to create subscripts and superscripts, and also more complex formulae such as fractions. Combined with the possibility to use several fonts (up to 20) at once, including ones supporting Greek, Cyrillic, and mathematical symbols, ChiWriter facilitated the writing of mathematical texts. Every font has the same fixed dimensions, but different sets are available for different output devices (for example, a low-resolution fonts for screen, and high-resolution fonts for printers). Users can manually create larger objects (such as sums and integrals) by using several symbols for each part of the object.

The editor is quite customizable. A font editor allows modifying fonts and introducing user-designed fonts (including proportional ones) and symbols.

By 1988 the company advertised ChiWriter ("completely 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get'") and optional accessories, such as support for graphics beyond EGA graphics, 24-pin printers, and laser printers.^[1] The editor was more oriented to speed and interactive aspect of editing, rather than on visual appearance of the result, therefore, it has its own graphical user interface with bitmap fonts of fixed width. Although popular (easier to use than TeX for many scientists), this^{[clarification needed]} led to its demise as more text editors with vector fonts for Microsoft Windows began to appear, and in 1996, it has been discontinued.

Recently people experience some difficulty with exhibiting ChiWriter documents. A simple solution takes into consideration the fact that in the quality printing mode ChiWriter outputs bit-image print codes which can be redirected into a file (default extension .bin). In the heydays of the editor, the codes Epson ESC/P were the most frequently used. Utility chipbm converts used by ChiWriter subset of bit-image print codes into a file Portable anymap (.pbm) which is loaded by many graphical utilities. For example, utility GIMP allows saving a page afterwards in Portable Document Format (.pdf).

It is still possible to run the application on modern computers, using DOS virtualization software, like VirtualBox or DosBox. This allows to convert the documents into the PostScript format (.ps), using the provided PostScript printer driver. PostScript format can be directly converted into Portable Document Format (.pdf) format.

• ChiWriter FAQ, Horstmann.
• ChiWriter and user applications