Recent advances in printing technology have reduced the cost of typeset-quality printers, but the production of attractively formatted documents requires typographic skill and special training on computer-based text processing systems. The goals of current research are to make text processing systems `user friendly' and to support the production of typeset-quality documents. Four software systems that aid the process of producing formatted documents are discussed: Scribe, developed at Carnegie-Mellon University; Bravo, an experimental system developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, TEX and METAFONT, from Stanford University; and Etude, currently under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.