ChiWriter


ChiWriter was a scientific word processor for MS-DOS, created by Cay Horstmann and released commercially in 1986.
It was one of the first WYSIWYG word processors that could write mathematical formulas, even on IBM PC XT computers. It was easier to use than TeX. It was relatively affordable and ran on personal computers, unlike TeX, which ran on expensive Unix computers.
ChiWriter was discontinued in 1996.
Since then, Horstmann has placed the ChiWriter executable in the public domain.
The source is unpublished.

Operation

ChiWriter let a user write text that was subscripted or superscripted with respect to the current text line. This text was treated as part of the core line, enabling complex formulae, such as fractions. It supported up to 20 fonts simultaneously, including fonts with Greek, Cyrillic, and mathematical symbols. Users could combine symbols to create larger objects, such as sums and integrals. Thus, ChiWriter facilitated writing mathematical and scientific texts.
It was easier to use than TeX, making it popular with scientists.
It focused on speed of use and on interactive editing, rather than on control over styling.
Though it was a DOS application, it used graphics display modes, implementing its own GUI.
It used its own with fixed width, bitmap fonts.
Every font had the same fixed dimensions, but different sets were available for different output devices.
A font editor allowed one to modify fonts and to add user-designed symbols and new fonts, including proportional fonts.

History

In 1988, Horstmann Software Design Corporation was advertising ChiWriter as "completely 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get'" along with several optional components, such as support for graphics beyond EGA, 24-pin dot-matrix printers, and laser printers.
A combination of market forces led to the company's demise.
In 2001, Horstmann wrote:

Access to old ChiWriter documents today

Via conversion to TeX

Horstmann Software Design sold a ChiWriter-to-TeX converter. This is not available from Horstmann's website.

Via laser output

As of 2020,
ChiWriter can run on modern computers, in a virtual machine runnning DOS.
Virtualizers known to work include VirtualBox and DosBox.
Once ChiWriter is running, assuming it has the laser printing option, use it to output a PostScript file from each document. PostScript is readily convertible to PDF.

Via dot-matrix output

ChiPBM is a program written in C by Dmitry Zaitsev, to convert dot-matrix output from ChiWriter.
It understands the subset of Epson ESC/P codes emitted by ChiWriter, and outputs portable bitmap data.
This is an output format for graphics, that is still used in 2025.
ChiPBM was announced by Zaitsev in February 2017, through self-promotion on Wikipedia.
It is apparently freeware: the source code seems unpublished and the executable can be downloaded free of charge.
As of December 2025, the ChiPBM executable on Zaitsev's website is built for x86-64 computers running Microsoft Windows.
There is no manual.
Instructions: use ChiWriter to print-to-file in "quality printing mode".
This creates a *.bin file, containing bitmap graphics and ESC/P codes.
Then, run ChiPBM to convert the *.bin file to a *.pbm file.
Use other tools to convert PBM to common document formats. For example, the graphics editor GIMP can convert PBM to PDF.