Lotus Word Pro is a

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

produced by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Lotus Software Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was sold to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 sprea ...

group for use on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

-compatible

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

s and on IBM

OS/2 Warp OS/2 is a proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, intended as a replac ...

. Word Pro was available as part of the

Lotus SmartSuite SmartSuite is a discontinued office suite from Lotus Software. The company made versions of its office suite for IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows. Status SmartSuite is no longer supported or maintained. SmartSuite used to be in maintenance mode, ...

office suite Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintin ...

. Word Pro was based upon Ami Pro (originally published by Samna), but was substantially rewritten (including a new native document format). The predecessor to Ami Pro, Amí, was released in 1988, and was the first fully functional Windows

(with the Windows version of

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

debuting in early 1989) Shortly after the release of Amí, the development team added support for tables and renamed the product Ami Pro. Lotus obtained Ami Pro to round out their office suite by acquiring Samna in 1990. Lotus continued to develop Ami Pro further with version 3 released in 1992. Version 3.1 is the last version of Ami Pro released (all versions were 16 bit). The Windows versions of Ami Pro were also bundled with Adobe Type Manager for Windows, as Windows had poor support for scalable fonts before the introduction of

TrueType TrueType is an Computer font#Outline fonts, outline font standardization, standard developed by Apple Inc., Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe Inc., Adobe's PostScript fonts#Type 1, Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the ...

. In 1994, Joe Guthridge was one of seven awarded the Windows Pioneer Award for feedback which the Ami development team gave to Microsoft during the early development of Windows. The last version of Word Pro was 9.8 Fixpack 6 from 2007 and runs on all Windows versions from Windows 95 to Windows 11.

References

1988 software Word Pro Word Pro OS/2 software Windows-only proprietary software Windows word processors {{WordProcessor-stub

See also

References