Professional Adventure Writer or PAW (sometimes called PAWS for Professional Adventure Writing System) is a program that allows the user to write textual adventure games with graphic illustrations. It was written by Tim Gilberts, Graeme Yeandle and Phil Wade, based on Yeandle's earlier system called The Quill. PAW was published by Gilsoft in 1986 and quickly gained a loyal following. PAW improved over The Quill in several ways. In particular, its textual input parser was more sophisticated, meaning inputs were no longer confined to the two-word telegraphic verb noun (e.g. "GO WEST; TAKE LAMP") style. PAW also supported NPCs, different character sets, and full use of the memory of the 128K ZX Spectrum.
Later a program called WinPAW was written by Douglas Harter. It could read adventures written in PAW, but ran under MS-Windows and had a few extensions to the original. The adventures made in WinPAW could only be played using the MS Windows runtime. In 2009 InPAWS was released in its first version. It allows you to extract PAW adventures, edit them or create from scratch and write back a database for PAW for either Amstrad CPC or ZX Spectrum. It thus also allows PAW adventures to be ported between the systems.
Graeme Yeandle also released an updated version of the CP/M version of PAW for MS-DOS and called it PC Adventure Writer.
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