AbiWord is a free and open source software word processor. It was originally started by SourceGear Corporation as the first part of a proposed AbiSuite. Development stopped when SourceGear changed their focus to Internet appliances. AbiWord was adopted by some open source developers and AbiWord continued to be developed. The name "AbiWord" (pronounced "Abby Word") is derived from the root of the Spanish word "abierto", meaning "open". It run...
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WordPerfect is a proprietary word processing application, now owned by Corel. Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University (BYU) graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General Corp. minicomputer system in 1979. Bastian and Ashton kept the rights to the WordPerfect software they designed for Orem, deciding to market it through their own com...
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LyX is a document processor following the self-coined "what you see is what you mean" paradigm (WYSIWYM), as opposed to the WYSIWYG ideas used by word processors. This means that the user only has to care about the structure of and information within the text, while the formatting is done by LaTeX, an advanced typesetting system. LyX is designed for authors who want professional output with a minimum of effort and without becoming specialist...
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Microsoft Office is an office suite of interrelated desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Microsoft Office was introduced by Microsoft in 1989 for Macintosh,[2] with a version for Windows in 1990.[3] Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Additionally, a "Pro...
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Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems.[1][2][3] Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), the Apple Macintosh (1984), the AT&T Unix PC (1985), Atari ST (1986), SCO UNIX, OS/2, and Microsoft Windows (1989). It is a component of the Microsoft Office system; however, it is also sold a...
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OpenOffice.org Writer is the word processor component of the OpenOffice.org software package. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel's WordPerfect, with some of their features.

As with the entire OpenOffice.org suite, Writer can be used across a variety of platforms, including Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Irix and Solaris. Released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence, W...
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