this paper presents the joyce system as an example of a fully-implemented, application-oriented text generation system. joyce covers the whole range of tasks associated with text generation, from content selection to morphological processing. it was developped as part of the interface of the software design environment ulysses. the following design goals were set for it: while we were able to exploit existing research for many of the design issues, it turned out that we needed to develop our own approach to text planning (ra.mbow 1990). this paper will present the system and attempt to show how these design objectives led to particular design decisions. the structure of the paper is as follows. in section 2, we will present the underlying application and give examples of the output of the system. in section 3, we will discuss the overall structure of joyce. we then discuss the three main components in turn: the text planner in section 4, the sentence planner in section 5 and the realizer in section 6. we will discuss the text planner in some detail since it represents a new approach to the problem. section 7 traces the generation of a short text. in section 8, we address the problem of portability, and wind up by discussing some shortcomings of joyce in the conclusion.in section 8, we address the problem of portability, and wind up by discussing some shortcomings of joyce in the conclusion. this paper presents the joyce system as an example of a fully-implemented, application-oriented text generation system. we are aware of several shortcomings of joyce, which we will address in future versions of the system. ple in text planning, it appears to play an important role as a constraint on possible text structures. it passes it through the incrementor to the formater, which downgrades it when a classified corrected reading leaves through p34. ii has met the design objectives of speed and quality, and our experience in porting the text generator to new task: and to new applications indicates that joyce is a flexibl( system that can adapt to a variety of text generatior tasks. initial results, including a prototype, are encouraging. porting is an important way to evaluate complete applied text generation systems, since there is no canonical set of tasks that such a system must be able to perform and on which it can be tested. the analyzer downgrades it to secret. furthermore, it helps determine the use of connectives between rhetorically related clauses. the joyce text generation system was developped part of the software design environment ulysses (korelsky and ulysses staff 1988; rosenthal et al 1988) ulysses includes a graphical environment for the design of secure, distributed software systems.