ArborText releases ADEPT/Global 6.5, opens Tokyo office; Newest release of the ADEPT Series offers Unicode support, extended Japanese language support and PC functionality.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 22, 1997--ArborText, Inc., the world's leading provider of industrial-strength software tools for authoring, editing and enterprise-wide publishing, today announced the 6.5 release of its ADEPT Series with Japanese language support.

The new version includes Unicode (ISO 1046-1:1993) as the character encoding standard to provide Japanese language support for double-byte characters. Release 6.5 provides full SGML-based editing and composition in Japanese using the native operating system input methods and fonts.

"Many of our multinational transportation and high-technology customers have committed to using the Japanese version of the ADEPT series," said Jim Sterken, president of ArborText. "Release 6.5 will become an essential part of any organization's documentation department that produces information for worldwide business units and a global customer-base."

"The ADEPT Series supports our multinational customers' requirements for a universal solution to their documentation creation and publishing requirements," said Mike McEvoy, ArborText's vice president of Engineering.

"ADEPT 6.5 lets our customers create structured Japanese documents and print those documents from SGML-formatted data in Japanese. This helps our customers migrate to a single database of document information across the enterprise. Because Unicode also supports English and other international character sets, they can easily create documents in multiple languages."

Extended Language Support

ADEPT 6.5 supports users that need encoding standards, such as Shift-JIS and JEUC, by reading and writing documents in the standard operating system-specific character sets through built-in or external mapping. Composition output is top-down, left-to-right and supports the specific line breaking conventions of the Japanese language.

Users are able to pick the English font of choice and a compatible Japanese font will automatically be chosen to match the weight and posture of the English font. ADEPT 6.5 supports any printer font which is of the same encoding as the system character set.

The ADEPT Command Language (ACL) is extended to work with double-byte characters, as all ACL strings within the application are in Unicode. This allows users to take advantage of ACL's power to customize and extend the standard editing tool.

New PC Functionality

The PC release of ADEPT 6.5 significantly extends functionality on Window NT and Windows 95 platforms with support for the Equation Editor. This powerful WYSIWYG equation editor is the first on Windows to allow users to build equations in a graphical form while retaining its underlying structure through the use of equation-oriented tagging.

Pricing and Availability

ADEPT Series 6.5 is available now with Japanese language support. The 6.5 release includes Document Architect, ADEPT Command Language, ADEPT Editor and ADEPT Publisher. Pricing starts at $1825. Version 6.5 is available on the following platforms:

-- Sun Microsystems Solaris 2.4 and 2.5

-- Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 95

-- future support for Hewlett-Packard HP/UX 

-- future support for IBM AIX 

ArborText Opens New Office in Tokyo

To support its resellers in Japan, ArborText has already opened and started staffing a service and support office in Tokyo. (The address is ArborText Japan, 1-11-16 Midorigaoka, Chofu-shi, Tokyo 182, Japan.)

George Underwood, vice president of Worldwide Sales for ArborText, commented, "We're strongly committed to the Japanese market because we see tremendous demand for products that help organizations improve their processes for capturing and reusing their vital knowledge assets. Through our resellers, Gakken and recently-announced NTT Data, we are well-positioned to respond to this growing market."

About the ADEPT Software Series

ArborText's ADEPT family of adaptable standards-based software allows users to create and maintain textual and graphic information as reusable elements independent of formatting, media, and computer software or hardware. Reuseable document elements make document preparation and publication more efficient and effective in a wide variety of applications ranging from technical publications to Web site management.

The ADEPT family's authoring, editing and publishing software is tightly integrated with third party document management software to enable high performance, enterprise-wide knowledge processing solutions.

About ArborText

Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ArborText develops and supports software that makes the process of capturing and delivering knowledge more effective. "Global 5,000" organizations use the company's products to author, catalog, and reuse information stored in document databases.

In production use since 1991, ArborText software is the keystone of high-volume document assembly systems at companies such as Boeing, Digital Equipment Corporation, Ford, Grolier's Encyclopedia, Lockheed Martin, Mobil, National Semiconductor, Raytheon and Sun Microsystems.

For more information about ArborText's products, consulting services and training programs, contact ArborText at 313/997-0200, send e-mail to [e-mail], or visit the ArborText Web-site located at http://www.arbortext.com . -0-

Note to Editors: ADEPT, ADEPT Editor, ADEPT Publisher, and ADEPT Command Language are trademarks of ArborText, Inc. All other products or service names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

In the product names noted in this news release, there should be an asterisk between Document and Architect, ADEPT and Editor, and ADEPT and Publisher. This symbol may not appear properly in some systems.

CONTACT: ArborText

P.G. Bartlett, 313/997-0200

[e-mail]

or

Phase Two Strategies

Carolyn Holck Brown, 415/772-8415

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