WordPerfect Corp, finally ready take the plunge and make an initial public offering of its shares (CI No 2,077) reports that it has bought a controlling interest in Reference Software International Inc, San Francisco, and reckons that it has landed the world leader in the development and marketing of software writing tools and electronic reference works. Through the acquisition, the Orem, Utah company acquires the Grammatik grammar-checking software and proprietary computer linquistics expertise it hopes will revolutionise the way word processing has been done up to now. With the release of Grammatik 5, Reference Software unveiled a new technology called Mor*Proof, technology claimed to be the basis for the computer to understand the content of a document. Grammatik is currently bundled with Lotus Ami Pro 3.0 in France, Microsoft Word for Windows 2.0 in France, and WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows in the US. Terms were not disclosed.
