WordMARC Composer[1][2] was a scientifically oriented word processor[3] developed by MARC Software, an offshoot of MARC Analysis Research Corporation[4] (which specialized in high end Finite Element Analysis software for mechanical engineering).
WordMARC was the creation of Pedro Marcal,[5] who pioneered work in finite element analysis and needed a technical word processor that both supported complex notations[6] and was capable of running on minicomputers and other high-end machines such as Alliant and AT&T.
[7] WordMARC was originally known as MUSE (MARC Universal Screen Editor),[8] but the name was changed because of a trademark conflict with another company when the product was ported to the IBM PC.
It did, however allow the use of proportional fonts by adjusting the margins based on the current text size using an estimated average character width in version 1.
Advanced features (for its time) included Document Assembly (maintaining each chapter of a book in separate files and combining them for printing or to produce a table of contents or index), automatic paragraph numbering, footnotes, endnotes, support for mixed fonts, multi-level equations and scientific characters.