About Softquad, Inc.

SoftQuad Inc. is the leading vendor of SGML and HTML software and services. We provide a broad range of multi-platform, standards-based software tools that give users the power to create information once and publish it many times, in many different ways: on screen, on paper, on CD-ROM, even on the Internet.

SoftQuad Inc. has its roots in Coach House Press, Canada's award-winning experimental literary publishing house. In 1983, David Slocombe, instrumental in the computerization of The Globe & Mail, Canada's national daily newspaper, had been working with a text formatting software program call troff (pronounced tee-roff), a product of AT&T's Bell Labs. Coach House was using troff to set type for the several hundred books it produced each year; Slocombe was improving the 15 year old software to make it more applicable to today's needs.

People working with the improved troff soon realized that an excellent product had been built, one that would let publishers ù and anyone else who regularly needed to produce professional quality documents ù save a significant portion of their typesetting costs. Here also was a product for the more than 350,000 people already using troff, including many AT&T employees, who would welcome improvements to this powerful workhorse software.

SoftQuad Inc. was formed in 1985 to sell and support SoftQuad Publishing Software. At about the same time interest was mounting in a new publishing standard, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Development began on a new product called, SoftQuad Author/Editor, a text-entry system conforming to the standard already adopted by ANSI, US Defense Department and a wide variety of international institutions and companies. SoftQuad's Author/Editor is designed to replace word-processing software for publishing and database applications. It produces output for use by all publishing and typesetting systems which support SGML. The software runs on a wide variety of platforms including workstations from Sun, IBM, Apple, Intergraph, DEC and Wang, and micro computers running DOS, Unix and Macintosh operating systems.