What is Arbortext?

When most people think of Arbortext they're thinking of the Arbortext Editor. However, Arbortext is a family of XML-based authoring, publishing, and content management products.

Arbortext Family of Products
It is an ever-growing product line but the main products are these:
 * Editor
 * IsoDraw (illustrations)
 * Architect (DTDs, schemas, configuration)
 * Publishing Engine & Advanced Print Publisher (rendering and transform to output formats)
 * Styler (stylesheeting)
 * Arbortext Content Manager (CMS)
 * There is also the Arbortext S1000D product set - includes all those S1000D & S2000M tools.

History
The first Arbortext Editor was released in 1991 under the name Adept Editor, making it one of the first SGML based editing tools. As the editor has been developed it has also been known as Epic Editor and is now known as simply Arbortext Editor.

Arbortext was a charter member of the OASIS DITA committee and the original DITA development undertaken by IBM was done using Arbortext products.

In 1995 Arbortext started its annual Arbortext Users’ Group International (AUGI) conference. When Arbortext was acquired by PTC, the conference was being handled by PTC/User and AUGI was folded into that event. In 2009, the PTC/User World Event was folded into the larger PlanetPTC event.

Former Arbortext building, 1000 Victors Way, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104:

Acquisitions
In 2004, Arbortext Inc. purchased the UK based Advent Publishing Systems, Ltd. Creators of the Advent 3B2 publishing software. The 3B2 product formed the basis of what is now known as the Arbortext Advanced Print Publisher.

In July 2005, Arbortext, Inc. was acquired by Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) a publicly traded product lifecycle management company.

In October 2006, PTC acquired the German ITEDO Software company for its IsoDraw and IsoView technical illustration products.

In November 2007, PTC acquired UK based Logistics Business Systems (LBS) which had the S1000D products.

Trivia
Arbortext was originally developed on the Visix Galaxy platform. In the history of computer programming languages, Galaxy was the first working platform-independent development environments. It was Java before there was Java. Java never quite got springs & struts working as well as Galaxy did. Galaxy let the Arbortext engineers develop the code and then automatically compile for multiple platforms. (Galaxy included support for developing applications for VAX, for example.) Members of the engineering team at Visixs when Arbortext showed up ("Hey, you've got to see what these Arbortext guys are doing with our stuff!").

When Visix shut its doors, Arbortext purchased the source code and, until the 5.0 version the Arbortext products were built in Galaxy. As of 5.0, the Windows version was developed as a native Windows application, but the Solaris versions were still developed using Galaxy and the Galaxy copyrights were still included in the Arbortext/PTC copyrights. As of 6.0, PTC discontinued development of the Solaris versions and Galaxy is finally defunct.