Previous Next

This is a handy utility for Tasword users, giving five Near Letter Quality type fonts - all with equal space justification - on dot matrix printers which have Epson-compatible quad. density graphics and are capable of one-third or one-half dot line feeds. There are two cpi fonts, Pica (traditional), and Mercury (modern), two 12 cpi, Elite (traditional), Piazza (italic), and a proportional font, Clarion, which gives a typeset appearance.

The program, with your chosen main font, is easily merged with a version of Tasword already customised for your printer and interface. The 'help' pages are lost, text capacity reduced to 294 pages, and the only graphics printer controls available are underline and emphasized. To access the other fonts, you exit to Basic and load the code from tape or microdrive. The program crashed instead of printing when a couple of the fonts were loaded using LOAD "" CODE, but all was well using LOAD "" CODE 50944.

Print speed is slowed, because the head makes two passes across each line, but the quality is excellent. Even my rather tired old ribbon produced clear typescript worthy of a daisywheel, and the equal space justification gives the most professional results. If you need to align columns, character spaces are available which will not be proportionally justified.

There is also a font editor, enabling characters to be modified, perhaps by adding accents, or defining fractions instead of unwanted characters. For the really adventurous, a blank character set can be generated to allow you to design your own complete typeface. Screen dumps are available to help keep a record of your designs, or to produce paper copies of the blank grid on which to plan our characters. Your modified or new fonts can be saved to tape or microdrive.

Qualitas is a useful program, making professional quality printouts available to those of us who like the versatility of the dot matrix, but regret its substandard appearance.