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111-483: The word processor was a stand-alone office machine developed in the 1960s, combining the keyboard text-entry and printing functions of an electric typewriter with a recording unit, either tape or floppy disk (as used by the Wang machine) with a simple dedicated computer processor for the editing of text. Although features and designs varied among manufacturers and models, and new features were added as technology advanced,

222-743: A Times article, urged that "the concept of 'word processing' could be the answer to Women's Lib advocates' prayers. Word processing will replace the 'traditional' secretary and give women new administrative roles in business and industry." The 1970s word processing concept did not refer merely to equipment, but, explicitly, to the use of equipment for "breaking down secretarial labor into distinct components, with some staff members handling typing exclusively while others supply administrative support. A typical operation would leave most executives without private secretaries. Instead one secretary would perform various administrative tasks for three or more secretaries." A 1971 article said that "Some [secretaries] see W/P as

333-576: A graphical user interface providing some form of what-you-see-is-what-you-get ("WYSIWYG") editing. Most are powerful systems consisting of one or more programs that can produce a combination of images , graphics and text, the latter handled with type-setting capability. Typical features of a modern word processor include multiple font sets, spell checking, grammar checking, a built-in thesaurus, automatic text correction , web integration, HTML conversion, pre-formatted publication projects such as newsletters and to-do lists, and much more. Microsoft Word

444-486: A voiceless velar fricative as in Modern Greek, similar to the ch in loch ). Lamport remarks that "TeX is usually pronounced tech , making lah -tech, lah- tech , and lay -tech the logical choices; but language is not always logical, so lay-tecks is also possible." The name is printed in running text with a typographical logo : L a T e X . In media where the logo cannot be precisely reproduced in running text,

555-631: A , e , i , o and u to produce á , é , í , ó and ú , reducing the number of sorts needed from 5 to 1. The typebars of "normal" characters struck a rod as they moved the metal character desired toward the ribbon and platen, and each rod depression moved the platen forward the width of one character. Dead keys had a typebar shaped so as not to strike the rod. In English-speaking countries, ordinary typewriters printing fixed-width characters were standardized to print six horizontal lines per vertical inch, and had either of two variants of character width, one called pica for ten characters per horizontal inch and

666-473: A TeX Users Group (TUG) meeting at Stanford, Lamport agreed to turn over maintenance and development of LaTeX to Frank Mittelbach . Frank Mittelbach, along with Chris Rowley and Rainer Schöpf, formed the LaTeX3 team; in 1994, they released LaTeX2e, the current standard version. LaTeX3 has since been cancelled with features intended for that version being back-ported to LaTeX2e since 2018. LaTeX attempts to follow

777-504: A Wang calculator to interface with an IBM Selectric typewriter, which was at the time used to calculate and print the paperwork for auto sales. In 1974, Koplow's interface program was developed into the Wang 1200 Word Processor, an IBM Selectric-based text-storage device. The operator of this machine typed text on a conventional IBM Selectric; when the Return key was pressed, the line of text

888-487: A career ladder into management; others see it as a dead-end into the automated ghetto; others predict it will lead straight to the picket line." The National Secretaries Association, which defined secretaries as people who "can assume responsibility without direct supervision", feared that W/P would transform secretaries into "space-age typing pools". The article considered only the organizational changes resulting from secretaries operating word processors rather than typewriters;

999-508: A cylinder inside a wooden box. In 1874, the cylinder was replaced by a carriage, moving beneath the writing head. Then, in 1875, the well-known "tall model" was patented, which was the first of the writing balls that worked without electricity. Malling-Hansen attended the world exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878 and he received the first-prize for his invention at both exhibitions. The first typewriter to be commercially successful

1110-655: A document in LaTeX, a user first creates a file, such as document.tex , typically using a text editor . The user then gives their document.tex file as input to the TeX program (with the LaTeX macros loaded), which prompts TeX to write out a file suitable for onscreen viewing or printing. This write-format-preview cycle is one of the chief ways in which working with LaTeX differs from the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) style of document editing. It

1221-527: A document, it follows (from the user's point of view) the following processing sequence: Macros → TeX → Driver → Output. Different implementations of each of these steps are typically available in TeX distributions. Traditional TeX will output a DVI file, which is usually converted to a PostScript file. In 2000, Hàn Thế Thành and others wrote an implementation of TeX called pdfTeX , which also outputs to PDF and takes advantage of features available in that format. The XeTeX engine developed by Jonathan Kew, on

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1332-421: A firm contract for the next batch. However, Remington was engaged in merger talks, which would eventually result in the creation of Remington Rand and no executives were willing to commit to a firm order. Northeast instead decided to enter the typewriter business for itself, and in 1929 produced the first Electromatic Typewriter. In 1928, Delco , a division of General Motors , purchased Northeast Electric, and

1443-549: A lack of continuous, reliable electricity. The QWERTY keyboard layout , developed for typewriters in the 1870s, remains the de facto standard for English-language computer keyboards . The origins of this layout still need to be clarified. Similar typewriter keyboards, with layouts optimised for other languages and orthographies, emerged soon afterward, and their layouts have also become standard for computer keyboards in their respective markets. Although many modern typewriters have one of several similar designs, their invention

1554-410: A little extra effort, he could make a general package usable by others. Peter Gordon, an editor at Addison-Wesley , convinced him to write a LaTeX user's manual for publication (Lamport was initially skeptical that anyone would pay money for it); it came out in 1986 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Meanwhile, Lamport released versions of his LaTeX macros in 1984 and 1985. On 21 August 1989, at

1665-411: A lower end of the market, selling for under US$ 200. During the late 1980s and into the 1990s the predominant word processing program was WordPerfect. It had more than 50% of the worldwide market as late as 1995, but by 2000 Microsoft Word had up to 95% market share. MacWrite , Microsoft Word, and other word processing programs for the bit-mapped Apple Macintosh screen, introduced in 1984, were probably

1776-578: A machine described as a "word processor", but it is more accurately a highly specialised microcomputer used for accounting and publishing. Word processing was one of the earliest applications for the personal computer in office productivity, and was the most widely used application on personal computers until the World Wide Web rose to prominence in the mid-1990s. Although the early word processors evolved to use tag-based markup for document formatting, most modern word processors take advantage of

1887-527: A manufacturer of sewing machines ) to commercialize the machine as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer . This was the origin of the term typewriter . Remington began production of its first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in Ilion, New York . It had a QWERTY keyboard layout, which, because of the machine's success, was slowly adopted by other typewriter manufacturers. As with most other early typewriters, because

1998-412: A minimum of nontext [control elements] items." Input was normally on punched cards or magnetic tape, with up to 80capital letters and non-alphabetic characters per card. The limited typographical controls available were implemented by control sequences; for example, letters were automatically converted to lower case unless they followed a full stop, that is, the "period" character. Output could be printed on

2109-645: A modified version of the IBM Selectric typewriter (the IBM 2741 Terminal). These 1969 products preceded CRT display-based word processors. Text editing was done using a line numbering system viewed on a paper copy inserted in the Selectric typewriter. Evelyn Berezin invented a Selectric-based word processor in 1969, and founded the Redactron Corporation to market the $ 8,000 machine. Redactron

2220-542: A one-line display for editing single lines. The first novel to be written on a word processor, the IBM MT/ST, was Len Deighton 's Bomber , published in 1970. The New York Times , reporting on a 1971 business equipment trade show, said In 1971, a third of all working women in the United States were secretaries, and they could see that word processing would affect their careers. Some manufacturers, according to

2331-641: A product in 1972, but went into receivership a year later. In 1976, refinanced by the Canada Development Corporation , it returned to operation as AES Data , and went on to successfully market its brand of word processors worldwide until its demise in the mid-1980s. Its first office product, the AES-90, combined for the first time a CRT-screen, a floppy-disk and a microprocessor, that is, the very same winning combination that would be used by IBM for its PC seven years later. The AES-90 software

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2442-401: A prominent role in the preparation and publication of books and articles that contain complex multilingual materials , such as Arabic and Greek . LaTeX uses the TeX typesetting program for formatting its output, and is itself written in the TeX macro language. LaTeX can be used as a standalone document preparation system, or as an intermediate format. In the latter role, for example, it

2553-493: A result, it encourages the separation of the layout from the content — while still allowing manual typesetting adjustments whenever needed. This concept is similar to the mechanism by which many word processors allow styles to be defined globally for an entire document, or the use of Cascading Style Sheets in styling HyperText Markup Language ( HTML ) documents. The LaTeX system is a markup language that handles typesetting and rendering, and can be arbitrarily extended by using

2664-503: A typical line printer in all-capitals — or in upper and lower case using a special ("TN") printer chain — or could be punched as a paper tape which could be printed, in better than line printer quality, on a Flexowriter. A workalike program with some improvements, DORMAT, was developed and used at University College London . Electromechanical paper-tape-based equipment such as the Friden Flexowriter had long been available;

2775-424: A video screen and a magnetic storage disk. The competitive edge for Dorsey's Micom 2000 was that, unlike many other machines, it was truly programmable. The Micom machine countered the problem of obsolescence by avoiding the limitations of a hard-wired system of program storage. The Micom 2000 utilized RAM, which was mass-produced and totally programmable. The Micom 2000 was said to be a year ahead of its time when it

2886-408: A video screen. The real breakthrough by Dorsey's AES team was that their machine stored the operator's texts on magnetic disks. Texts could be retrieved from the disks simply by entering their names at the keyboard. More importantly, a text could be edited, for instance a paragraph moved to a new place, or a spelling error corrected, and these changes were recorded on the magnetic disk. The AES machine

2997-589: A word processor on their computers, word processing in the home tends to be educational, planning or business related, dealing with school assignments or work being completed at home. Occasionally word processors are used for recreational purposes, e.g. writing short stories, poems or personal correspondence. Some use word processors to create résumés and greeting cards , but many of these home publishing processes have been taken over by web apps or desktop publishing programs specifically oriented toward home uses. The rise of email and social networks has also reduced

3108-650: A workable design. Some early typing instruments include: By the mid-19th century, the increasing pace of business communication had created a need to mechanize the writing process. Stenographers and telegraphers could take down information at rates up to 130 words per minute, whereas a writer with a pen was limited to a maximum of 30 words per minute (the 1853 speed record). From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial production. In 1865, Rev. Rasmus Malling-Hansen of Denmark invented

3219-429: A writing tool for mathematicians and computer scientists, but even from early in its development, it has also been taken up by scholars who needed to write documents that include complex math expressions or non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic , Devanagari and Chinese . LaTeX is intended to provide a high-level, descriptive markup language to utilize TeX more easily. TeX handles the document layout, while LaTeX handles

3330-460: Is Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) compliant as of version 1.3. As free software , LaTeX is available on most operating systems, which include Unix ( Solaris , HP-UX , AIX ), BSD ( FreeBSD , macOS , NetBSD , OpenBSD ), Linux ( Red Hat , Debian , Arch , Gentoo ), Windows , DOS , RISC OS , AmigaOS , and Plan 9 . LaTeX2e is the current version of LaTeX, since it replaced LaTeX 2.09 in 1994. As of 2020 , LaTeX3, which started in

3441-560: Is LaTeX2e, first released in 1994 but incrementally updated starting in 2015. This update policy replaced earlier plans for a separate release of LaTeX3, which had been in development since 1989. LaTeX is free software and is distributed under the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) . LaTeX was created in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport when he was working at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). He needed to write TeX macros for his own use and thought that with

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3552-658: Is considered the first practical power-operated typewriter in 1914. In 1920, after returning from Army service, he produced a successful model and in 1923 turned it over to the Northeast Electric Company of Rochester for development. Northeast was interested in finding new markets for their electric motors and developed Smathers's design so that it could be marketed to typewriter manufacturers, and from 1925 Remington Electric typewriters were produced powered by Northeast's motors. After some 2,500 electric typewriters had been produced, Northeast asked Remington for

3663-439: Is favored for legal applications), Apple's Pages application, and open source applications such as OpenOffice.org Writer , LibreOffice Writer , AbiWord , KWord , and LyX . Web-based word processors such as Office Online or Google Docs are a relatively new category. Word processors evolved dramatically once they became software programs rather than dedicated machines. They can usefully be distinguished from text editors ,

3774-404: Is similar to the code-compile-execute cycle known to computer programmers. Today, many LaTeX-aware editing programs make this cycle a simple matter through the pressing of a single key, while showing the output preview on the screen beside the input window. Some online LaTeX editors even automatically refresh the preview, while other online tools provide incremental editing in-place, mixed in with

3885-449: Is sometimes used as part of a pipeline for translating DocBook and other XML -based formats for PDF . The typesetting system offers programmable desktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing of tables and figures, chapter and section headings, graphics, page layout, indexing and bibliographies . Like TeX, LaTeX started as

3996-497: Is the most widely used word processing software according to a user tracking system built into the software. Microsoft estimates that roughly half a billion people use the Microsoft Office suite, which includes Word. Many other word processing applications exist, including WordPerfect (which dominated the market from the mid-1980s to early-1990s on computers running Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system , and still (2014)

4107-577: Is typically distributed along with plain TeX under a free software license : the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL). The LPPL is not compatible with the GNU General Public License , as it requires that modified files must be clearly differentiable from their originals (usually by changing the filename); this was done to ensure that files that depend on other files will produce the expected behavior and avoid dependency hell . The LPPL

4218-540: Is unimportant. Due to their use in managing complex software projects, text editors can sometimes provide better facilities for managing large writing projects than a word processor. Word processing added to the text editor the ability to control type style and size, to manage lines (word wrap), to format documents into pages, and to number pages. Functions now taken for granted were added incrementally, sometimes by purchase of independent providers of add-on programs. Spell checking, grammar checking and mail merge were some of

4329-537: The Gypsy word processor which was commercialised in the Xerox Star product range). Standalone word processors adapted by getting smaller and replacing their CRTs with small character-oriented LCD displays. Some models also had computer-like features such as floppy disk drives and the ability to output to an external printer. They also got a name change, now being called "electronic typewriters" and typically occupying

4440-569: The Hansen Writing Ball , which went into commercial production in 1870 and was the first commercially sold typewriter. It was a success in Europe and was reported as being used in offices on the European continent as late as 1909. Malling-Hansen used a solenoid escapement to return the carriage on some of his models, which makes him a candidate for the title of inventor of the first "electric" typewriter. The Hansen Writing Ball

4551-531: The font . In 1941, IBM announced the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing. By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a typeset page, an effect that was further enhanced by including the 1937 innovation of carbon-film ribbons that produced clearer, sharper words on

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4662-582: The 8-inch floppy, then the 5¼-inch (drives by Shugart Associates and diskettes by Dysan ). Printing of documents was initially accomplished using IBM Selectric typewriters modified for ASCII -character input. These were later replaced by application-specific daisy wheel printers , first developed by Diablo , which became a Xerox company, and later by Qume . For quicker "draft" printing, dot-matrix line printers were optional alternatives with some word processors. Electric Pencil , released in December 1976,

4773-530: The AES 90. Numerous machines of this kind emerged, typically marketed by traditional office-equipment companies such as IBM, Lanier (marketing AES Data machines, re-badged), CPT, and NBI. All were specialized, dedicated, proprietary systems, priced around $ 10,000. Cheap general-purpose computers were still for hobbyists. Some of the earliest CRT-based machines used cassette tapes for removable-memory storage until floppy diskettes became available for this purpose - first

4884-590: The Bar-Let and the Corona No. 3 Typewriter have two separate shift keys, a "CAP" shift (for uppercase) and a "FIG" shift (for numbers and symbols). The Murray code was developed for a teletypewriter with a similar three-row typewriter keyboard. To facilitate typewriter use in business settings, a tab (tabulator) key was added in the late nineteenth century. Before using the key, the operator had to set mechanical "tab stops", pre-designated locations to which

4995-499: The E-S-D-X-centered "diamond" for cursor navigation, and modern vi-like editors encourage use of hjkl for navigation.) However, the price differences between dedicated word processors and general-purpose PCs, and the value added to the latter by software such as VisiCalc , were so compelling that personal computers and word processing software soon became serious competition for the dedicated machines. Word processing became

5106-590: The Flexowriter allowed for operations such as repetitive typing of form letters (with a pause for the operator to manually type in the variable information), and when equipped with an auxiliary reader, could perform an early version of " mail merge ". Circa 1970 it began to be feasible to apply electronic computers to office automation tasks. IBM's Mag Tape Selectric Typewriter ( MT/ST ) and later Mag Card Selectric (MCST) were early devices of this kind, which allowed editing, simple revision, and repetitive typing, with

5217-584: The LaTeX file to other formats such as OpenDocument , XML , or class ( *.cls ) files. LaTeX can also (and commonly is) rendered to PDF files using the LaTeX extension pdfLaTeX. LaTeX files containing Unicode text can be processed into PDFs with the inputenc package, or by the TeX extensions XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX. LaTeX has become the de facto standard to typeset mathematical expression in scientific documents. Hence, there are several conversion tools focusing on mathematical LaTeX expressions, such as converters to MathML or Computer Algebra System . LaTeX

5328-551: The Simplex Typewriter Company made index typewriters for 1/40 the price of a Remington typewriter. The index typewriter's niche appeal however soon disappeared as, on the one hand new keyboard typewriters became lighter and more portable, and on the other refurbished second-hand machines began to become available. The last widely available western index machine was the Mignon typewriter produced by AEG which

5439-461: The United States—but before the advent of daisywheel and electronic machines—the typewriter market faced strong competition from less expensive typewriters from Asia, including Brother Industries and Silver Seiko Ltd. of Japan. In most of the early typewriters, the typebars struck upward against the paper, pressed against the bottom of the platen , so the typist could not see the text as it

5550-582: The ability to produce perfect "originals". Thus, the Times headlined a 1974 Xerox product as a "speedier electronic typewriter", but went on to describe the product, which had no screen, as "a word processor rather than strictly a typewriter, in that it stores copy on magnetic tape or magnetic cards for retyping, corrections, and subsequent printout". In the late 1960s IBM provided a program called FORMAT for generating printed documents on any computer capable of running Fortran IV. Written by Gerald M. Berns, FORMAT

5661-417: The basket of typebars, in which case the typewriter is described as "basket shift", or the paper-holding carriage, in which case the typewriter is described as "carriage shift". Either mechanism caused a different portion of the typebar to come in contact with the ribbon/platen. The result is that each typebar could type two different characters, cutting the number of keys and typebars in half (and simplifying

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5772-429: The carriage would advance when the tab key was pressed. This facilitated the typing of columns of numbers, freeing the operator from the need to manually position the carriage. The first models had one tab stop and one tab key; later ones allowed as many stops as desired, and sometimes had multiple tab keys, each of which moved the carriage a different number of spaces ahead of the decimal point (the tab stop), to facilitate

5883-481: The category of software they evolved from. A text editor is a program that is used for typing, copying, pasting, and printing text (a single character, or strings of characters). Text editors do not format lines or pages. (There are extensions of text editors which can perform formatting of lines and pages: batch document processing systems, starting with TJ-2 and RUNOFF and still available in such systems as LaTeX and Ghostscript , as well as programs that implement

5994-409: The concept that each key was attached to a typebar that had the corresponding letter molded, in reverse, into its striking head. When a key was struck briskly and firmly, the typebar hit a ribbon (usually made of inked fabric ), making a printed mark on the paper wrapped around a cylindrical platen . The platen was mounted on a carriage that moved horizontally to the left, automatically advancing

6105-461: The content side for document processing. LaTeX comprises a collection of TeX macros and a program to process LaTeX documents, and because the plain TeX formatting commands are elementary, it provides authors with ready-made commands for formatting and layout requirements such as chapter headings, footnotes, cross-references and bibliographies. LaTeX was originally written in the early 1980s by Leslie Lamport at SRI International . The current version

6216-433: The design philosophy of separating presentation from content , so that authors can focus on the content of what they are writing without attending simultaneously to its visual appearance. In preparing a LaTeX document, the author specifies the logical structure using simple, familiar concepts such as chapter , section , table , figure , etc., and lets the LaTeX system handle the formatting and layout of these structures. As

6327-491: The early 1990s, is under a long-term development project. Planned features include improved syntax (separation of content from styling), hyperlink support, a new user interface, access to arbitrary fonts and a new documentation. Some LaTeX3 features are available in LaTeX2e using packages, and by 2020 many features have been enabled in LaTeX2e by default for a gradual transition. There are many commercial implementations of

6438-516: The electric typewriter came in 1910, when Charles and Howard Krum filed a patent for the first practical teletypewriter . The Krums' machine, named the Morkrum Printing Telegraph, used a typewheel rather than individual typebars. This machine was used for the first commercial teletypewriter system on Postal Telegraph Company lines between Boston and New York City in 1910. James Fields Smathers of Kansas City invented what

6549-568: The electric typewriter was laid by the Universal Stock Ticker , invented by Thomas Edison in 1870. This device remotely printed letters and numbers on a stream of paper tape from input generated by a specially designed typewriter at the other end of a telegraph line. Some electric typewriters were patented in the 19th century, but the first machine known to be produced in series is the Cahill of 1900. Another electric typewriter

6660-511: The extent that typographical features like bold and italics, indentation, justification and margins were approximated on screen. The mid-to-late 1980s saw the spread of laser printers, a "typographic" approach to word processing, and of true WYSIWYG bitmap displays with multiple fonts (pioneered by the Xerox Alto computer and Bravo word processing program), PostScript , and graphical user interfaces (another Xerox PARC innovation, with

6771-508: The far left was then pressed to the right to return the carriage to its starting position and rotating the platen to advance the paper vertically. A small bell was struck a few characters before the right hand margin was reached to warn the operator to complete the word and then use the carriage-return lever. By about 1910, the "manual" or "mechanical" typewriter had reached a somewhat standardized design. There were minor variations from one manufacturer to another, but most typewriters followed

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6882-470: The first true WYSIWYG word processors to become known to many people until the introduction of Microsoft Windows. Dedicated word processors eventually became museum pieces. Electric typewriter A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys , and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectively against

6993-668: The first word processors typically featured a monochrome display and the ability to save documents on memory cards or diskettes . Later models introduced innovations such as spell-checking programs, and improved formatting options. As the more versatile combination of personal computers and printers became commonplace, and computer software applications for word processing became popular, most business machine companies stopped manufacturing dedicated word processor machines. As of 2009 there were only two U.S. companies, Classic and AlphaSmart , which still made them. Many older machines, however, remain in use. Since 2009, Sentinel has offered

7104-602: The front side of the platen, became standard. One of the first was the Daugherty Visible, introduced in 1893, which also introduced the four-bank keyboard that became standard, although the Underwood which came out two years later was the first major typewriter with these features. A significant innovation was the shift key , introduced with the Remington No. 2 in 1878. This key physically "shifted" either

7215-530: The general structure of a document, to stylise text throughout a document (such as bold and italics), and to add citations and cross-references . A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX is used to produce an output file (such as PDF or DVI ) suitable for printing or digital distribution . LaTeX is widely used in academia for the communication and publication of scientific documents and technical note-taking in many fields, owing partially to its support for complex mathematical notation. It also has

7326-442: The home role of the word processor as uses that formerly required printed output can now be done entirely online . Word processors are descended from the Friden Flexowriter , which had two punched tape stations and permitted switching from one to the other (thus enabling what was called the "chain" or "form letter", one tape containing names and addresses, and the other the body of the letter to be sent). It did not wrap words, which

7437-420: The index type--albeit with a very much larger index and number of type elements. Embossing tape label makers are the most common index typewriters today, and perhaps the most common typewriters of any kind still being manufactured. The platen was mounted on a carriage that moved horizontally to the left, automatically advancing the typing position, after each character was typed. The carriage-return lever at

7548-411: The internal mechanisms considerably). The obvious use for this was to allow letter keys to type both upper and lower case , but normally the number keys were also duplexed, allowing access to special symbols such as percent, % , and ampersand, & . Before the shift key, typewriters had to have a separate key and typebar for upper-case letters; in essence, the typewriter had two keyboards, one above

7659-496: The keyboard. In the early part of the 20th century, a typewriter was marketed under the name Noiseless and advertised as "silent". It was developed by Wellington Parker Kidder and the first model was marketed by the Noiseless Typewriter Company in 1917. Noiseless portables sold well in the 1930s and 1940s, and noiseless standards continued to be manufactured until the 1960s. In a conventional typewriter

7770-451: The most popular add-ons for early word processors. Word processors are also capable of hyphenation, and the management and correct positioning of footnotes and endnotes. More advanced features found in recent word processors include: Later desktop publishing programs were specifically designed with elaborate pre-formatted layouts for publication, offering only limited options for changing the layout, while allowing users to import text that

7881-455: The most popular use for personal computers, and unlike the spreadsheet (dominated by Lotus 1-2-3 ) and database ( dBase ) markets, WordPerfect , XyWrite , Microsoft Word , pfs:Write , and dozens of other word processing software brands competed in the 1980s; PC Magazine reviewed 57 different programs in one January 1986 issue. Development of higher-resolution monitors allowed them to provide limited WYSIWYG —What You See Is What You Get, to

7992-414: The number of whose characters (sorts) was constrained by the physical limits of the machine, the number of keys required was reduced by the use of dead keys . Diacritics such as ´ ( acute accent ) would be assigned to a dead key , which did not move the platen forward, permitting another character to be imprinted at the same location; thus a single dead key such as the acute accent could be combined with

8103-410: The opposite direction. By 1900, notable typewriter manufacturers included E. Remington and Sons , IBM , Godrej , Imperial Typewriter Company , Oliver Typewriter Company , Olivetti , Royal Typewriter Company , Smith Corona , Underwood Typewriter Company , Facit , Adler , and Olympia-Werke . After the market had matured under the market dominance of large companies from Britain, Europe and

8214-425: The other elite , for twelve. This differed from the use of these terms in printing, where pica is a linear unit (approximately 1 ⁄ 6 of an inch) used for any measurement, the most common one being the height of a typeface. Some ribbons were inked in black and red stripes, each being half the width and running the entire length of the ribbon. A lever on most machines allowed switching between colors, which

8325-538: The other hand, merges modern font technologies and Unicode with TeX. LuaTeX is an extended version of pdfTeX using Lua as an embedded scripting language. There are also many editors for LaTeX, some of which are offline, source-code-based while others are online, partial-WYSIWYG-based. For more, see Comparison of TeX editors . LaTeX documents ( *.tex ) can be opened with any text editor. They consist of plain text and contain no hidden formatting codes or binary information. TeX documents can also be shared by rendering

8436-684: The other. With the shift key, manufacturing costs (and therefore purchase price) were greatly reduced, and typist operation was simplified; both factors contributed greatly to mass adoption of the technology. Certain models further reduced the number of keys and typebars by making each key perform three functions – each typebar could type three different characters. These little three-row machines were portable and could be used by journalists. Such three-row machines were popular with WWI journalists because they were lighter and more compact than four-bank typewriters, while they could type just as fast and use just as many symbols. Such three-row machines, such as

8547-532: The page. LaTeX LaTeX ( / ˈ l ɑː t ɛ k / LAH -tek or / ˈ l eɪ t ɛ k / LAY -tek , often stylized as L a T e X ) is a software system for typesetting documents. LaTeX markup describes the content and layout of the document, as opposed to the formatted text found in WYSIWYG word processors like Google Docs , LibreOffice Writer and Microsoft Word . The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define

8658-411: The paged-media extensions to HTML and CSS ). Text editors are now used mainly by programmers , website designers, computer system administrators, and, in the case of LaTeX , by mathematicians and scientists (for complex formulas and for citations in rare languages). They are also useful when fast startup times, small file sizes, editing speed, and simplicity of operation are valued, and when formatting

8769-569: The paper with a type element . Thereby, the machine produces a legible written document composed of ink and paper. By the end of the 19th century, a person who used such a device was also referred to as a type writer . The first commercial typewriters were introduced in 1874, but did not become common in offices in the United States until after the mid-1880s. The typewriter quickly became an indispensable tool for practically all writing other than personal handwritten correspondence. It

8880-418: The possibility that word processors might result in managers creating documents without the intervention of secretaries was not considered—not surprising in an era when few managers, but most secretaries, possessed keyboarding skills. In 1972, Stephen Bernard Dorsey , Founder and President of Canadian company Automatic Electronic Systems (AES), introduced the world's first programmable word processor with

8991-581: The preview in a streamlined single window. The example below shows the input to LaTeX and the corresponding output from the system: The characters 'T', 'E', and 'X' in the name come from the Greek capital letters tau , epsilon , and chi , as the name of TeX derives from the Ancient Greek : τέχνη ('skill', 'art', 'technique'); for this reason, TeX's creator Donald Knuth promotes its pronunciation as / t ɛ x / ( tekh ) (that is, with

9102-480: The ribbon being struck at all. This enabled the keys to hit the paper unobstructed, and was used for cutting stencils for stencil duplicators (aka mimeograph machines). The first typewriter to have the sliding type bars (laid out horizontally like a fan) that enable a typewriter to be "noiseless" was the American made Rapid which appeared briefly on the market in 1890. The Rapid also had the remarkable ability for

9213-469: The smaller, more generic PC keyboard, MultiMate used stick-on labels and a large plastic clip-on template to remind users of its dozens of Wang-like functions, using the shift, alt and ctrl keys with the 10 IBM function keys and many of the alphabet keys. Other early word-processing software required users to memorize semi-mnemonic key combinations rather than pressing keys labelled "copy" or "bold". (Many early PCs lacked cursor keys; WordStar famously used

9324-497: The term word processing itself was only introduced, by IBM 's Böblingen Laboratory in the late 1960s. In 1969, two software based text editing products (Astrotype and Astrocomp) were developed and marketed by Information Control Systems ( Ann Arbor Michigan). Both products used the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 mini computer, DECtape (4” reel) randomly accessible tape drives, and

9435-412: The term in a broad and vague way as "the combination of people, procedures, and equipment which transforms ideas into printed communications," and originally used it to include dictating machines and ordinary, manually operated Selectric typewriters. By the early seventies, however, the term was generally understood to mean semiautomated typewriters affording at least some form of editing and correction, and

9546-403: The type bar reaches the end of its travel simply by striking the ribbon and paper. The Noiseless, developed by Kidder, has a complex lever mechanism that decelerates the type bar mechanically before pressing it against the ribbon and paper in an attempt to dampen the noise. Although electric typewriters would not achieve widespread popularity until nearly a century later, the basic groundwork for

9657-762: The typebars strike upwards, the typist could not see the characters as they were typed. The index typewriter came into the market in the early 1880s. The index typewriter uses a pointer or stylus to choose a letter from an index. The pointer is mechanically linked so that the letter chosen could then be printed, most often by the activation of a lever. The index typewriter was briefly popular in niche markets. Although they were slower than keyboard type machines, they were mechanically simpler and lighter. They were therefore marketed as being suitable for travellers and, because they could be produced more cheaply than keyboard machines, as budget machines for users who needed to produce small quantities of typed correspondence. For example,

9768-632: The typewriter business was spun off as Electromatic Typewriters, Inc. In 1933, Electromatic was acquired by IBM , which then spent $ 1 million on a redesign of the Electromatic Typewriter, launching the IBM Electric Typewriter Model 01. In 1931, an electric typewriter was introduced by Varityper Corporation. It was called the Varityper , because a narrow cylinder-like wheel could be replaced to change

9879-444: The typing of columns with numbers of different length ($ 1.00, $ 10.00, $ 100.00, etc.) Languages such as French, Spanish, and German required diacritics , special signs attached to or on top of the base letter: for example, a combination of the acute accent ´ plus e produced é ; ~ plus n produced ñ . In metal typesetting , ⟨é⟩ , ⟨ñ⟩ , and others were separate sorts . With mechanical typewriters,

9990-455: The typing position, after each character was typed. The carriage-return lever at the far left was then pressed to the right to return the carriage to its starting position and rotating the platen to advance the paper vertically. A small bell was struck a few characters before the right hand margin was reached to warn the operator to complete the word and then use the carriage-return lever. Typewriters for languages written right-to-left operate in

10101-457: The typist to have entire control of the carriage by manipulation of the keyboard alone. The two keys that achieve this are positioned at the top of the keyboard (seen in the detail image below). They are a "Lift" key that advances the paper, on the platen, to the next line and a "Return" key that causes the carriage to automatically swing back to the right, ready for one to type the new line. So an entire page could be typed without one's hands leaving

10212-416: The underlying macro language to develop custom macros such as new environments and commands. Such macros are often collected into packages, which could then be made available to address some specific typesetting needs such as the formatting of complex mathematical expressions or graphics (e.g., the use of the align environment provided by the amsmath package to produce aligned equations). To create

10323-466: The word is typically given the unique capitalization LaTeX. Alternatively, the TeX, LaTeX and XeTeX logos can also be rendered via pure CSS and XHTML for use in graphical web browsers — by following the specifications of the internal \LaTeX macro. As a macro package, LaTeX provides a set of macros for TeX to interpret. There are many other macro packages for TeX, including Plain TeX, GNU Texinfo , AMSTeX , and ConTeXt . When TeX "compiles"

10434-534: Was able to handle French and English typing from the start, displaying and printing the texts side-by-side, a Canadian government requirement. The first eight units were delivered to the office of the then Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau , in February 1974. Despite these predecessors, Wang's product was a standout, and by 1978 it had sold more of these systems than any other vendor. The phrase "word processor" rapidly came to refer to CRT-based machines similar to

10545-587: Was actually a sophisticated computer that could be reprogrammed by changing the instructions contained within a few chips. In 1975, Dorsey started Micom Data Systems and introduced the Micom 2000 word processor. The Micom 2000 improved on the AES design by using the Intel 8080 single-chip microprocessor, which made the word processor smaller, less costly to build and supported multiple languages. Around this time, DeltaData and Wang word processors also appeared, again with

10656-419: Was begun by IBM's Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (later, Magnetic Card Selectric Typewriter). Expensive Typewriter , written and improved between 1961 and 1962 by Steve Piner and L. Peter Deutsch , was a text editing program that ran on a DEC PDP-1 computer at MIT . Since it could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter (a letter-quality printer), it may be considered the first-word processing program, but

10767-541: Was described in his paper "Description of FORMAT, a Text-Processing Program" (Communications of the ACM, Volume 12, Number 3, March, 1969) as "a production program which facilitates the editing and printing of 'finished' documents directly on the printer of a relatively small (64k) computer system. It features good performance, totally free-form input, very flexible formatting capabilities including up to eight columns per page, automatic capitalization, aids for index construction, and

10878-443: Was incremental, developed by numerous inventors working independently or in competition with each other over a series of decades. As with the automobile , the telephone, and telegraph , several people contributed insights and inventions that eventually resulted in ever more commercially successful instruments. Historians have estimated that some form of the typewriter was invented 52 times as thinkers and tinkerers tried to come up with

10989-453: Was introduced into a marketplace that represented some pretty serious competition such as IBM, Xerox and Wang Laboratories . In 1978, Micom partnered with Dutch multinational Philips and Dorsey grew Micom's sales position to number three among major word processor manufacturers, behind only IBM and Wang. In the early 1970s, computer scientist Harold Koplow was hired by Wang Laboratories to program calculators. One of his programs permitted

11100-531: Was patented in 1868 by Americans Christopher Latham Sholes , Frank Haven Hall , Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule in Milwaukee, Wisconsin , although Sholes soon disowned the machine and refused to use or even recommend it. The working prototype was made by clock-maker and machinist Matthias Schwalbach. Hall, Glidden and Soule sold their shares in the patent (US 79,265) to Densmore and Sholes, who made an agreement with E. Remington and Sons (then famous as

11211-500: Was produced by the Blickensderfer Manufacturing Company , of Stamford, Connecticut , in 1902. Like the manual Blickensderfer typewriters, it used a cylindrical typewheel rather than individual typebars. The machine was produced in several variants but apparently not a commercial success, having come to market ahead of its time, before ubiquitous electrification . The next step in the development of

11322-465: Was produced until 1934. Considered one of the very best of the index typewriters, part of the Mignon's popularity was that it featured interchangeable indexes as well as type , fonts and character sets . This is something very few keyboard machines were capable of--and only at considerable added cost. Although they were pushed out of the market in most of the world by keyboard machines, successful Japanese and Chinese typewriters typewriters are of

11433-410: Was produced with only upper-case characters. The Writing Ball was a template for inventor Frank Haven Hall to create a derivative that would produce letter prints cheaper and faster. Malling-Hansen developed his typewriter further through the 1870s and 1880s and made many improvements, but the writing head remained the same. On the first model of the writing ball from 1870, the paper was attached to

11544-652: Was sold to Burroughs Corporation in 1976, where the Redactron-II and -III were sold both as standalone units and as peripherals to the company's mainframe computers. By 1971 word processing was recognized by the New York Times as a " buzz word ". A 1974 Times article referred to "the brave new world of Word Processing or W/P. That's International Business Machines talk ... I.B.M. introduced W/P about five years ago for its Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter and other electronic razzle-dazzle." IBM defined

11655-634: Was stored on a cassette tape. One cassette held roughly 20 pages of text, and could be "played back" (i.e., the text retrieved) by printing the contents on continuous-form paper in the 1200 typewriter's "print" mode. The stored text could also be edited, using keys on a simple, six-key array. Basic editing functions included Insert, Delete, Skip (character, line), and so on. The labor and cost savings of this device were immediate, and remarkable: pages of text no longer had to be retyped to correct simple errors, and projects could be worked on, stored, and then retrieved for use later on. The rudimentary Wang 1200 machine

11766-480: Was the first word processor software for microcomputers. Software-based word processors running on general-purpose personal computers gradually displaced dedicated word processors, and the term came to refer to software rather than hardware. Some programs were modeled after particular dedicated WP hardware. MultiMate , for example, was written for an insurance company that had hundreds of typists using Wang systems, and spread from there to other Wang customers. To adapt to

11877-604: Was the precursor of the Wang Office Information System (OIS), introduced in 1976. It was a true office machine, affordable by organizations such as medium-sized law firms, and easily learned and operated by secretarial staff. The Wang was not the first CRT-based machine nor were all of its innovations unique to Wang. In the early 1970s Linolex, Lexitron and Vydec introduced pioneering word-processing systems with CRT display editing. A Canadian electronics company, Automatic Electronic Systems, had introduced

11988-402: Was typed. What was typed was not visible until a carriage return caused it to scroll into view. The difficulty with any other arrangement was ensuring the typebars fell back into place reliably when the key was released. This was eventually achieved with various ingenious mechanical designs and so-called "visible typewriters" which used frontstriking, in which the typebars struck forward against

12099-404: Was useful for bookkeeping entries where negative amounts were highlighted in red. The red color was also used on some selected characters in running text, for emphasis. When a typewriter had this facility, it could still be fitted with a solid black ribbon; the lever was then used to switch to fresh ribbon when the first stripe ran out of ink. Some typewriters also had a third position which stopped

12210-513: Was widely used by professional writers, in offices, in business correspondence in private homes, and by students preparing written assignments. Typewriters were a standard fixture in most offices up to the 1980s. After that, they began to be largely supplanted by personal computers running word processing software. Nevertheless, typewriters remain common in some parts of the world. For example, typewriters are still used in many Indian cities and towns, especially in roadside and legal offices, due to

12321-682: Was written using a text editor or word processor, or type the text in themselves. Word processors have a variety of uses and applications within the business world, home, education, journalism, publishing, and the literary arts. Within the business world, word processors are extremely useful tools. Some typical uses include: creating legal documents, company reports, publications for clients, letters , and internal memos . Businesses tend to have their own format and style for any of these, and additions such as company letterhead . Thus, modern word processors with layout editing and similar capabilities find widespread use in most business. While many homes have

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