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Loading and using Tasword Two is one of the pleasures of life. You know that it is going to do you proud and you are confident that you can leave it to get on with its job while you concentrate on writing and polishing your immortal prose. Yet one of the advantages of Tasword is that you are free to modify it if you have a little skill in Basic or machine code. This is not to say that Tasword Two is inadequate in its original form. Far from it, but there are certain modifications which you can make to personalise it and bring the operation and output even nearer to your own idea of perfection. It is possible, for example, to include a word count or page numbering routine.

However, such modifications may be beyond the programming skills of theuser. Never mind. All is not lost, because you can buy ready-made programs to MERGE with Tasword. One of these is Taspro, which produces a more professional output on dot-matrix and daisywheel printers by putting equal spaces between words in right justified text. Tasword Two, like many word processors, normally justifies lines by inserting extra spaces between words, starting at the end of the line. This, while perfectly adequate for normal use, can output text which is noticeably sparse on the right of the page. The Taspro modification avoids this and gives improved readability and superior appearance.

The program works by calculating the total amount of space necessary to justify each line and then divides it up between each word by sending non-standard but equal-length spaces to the printer. The appearance on the screen is not altered. Dot-matrix printers are switched to bit image mode and a number of high resolution spaces are printed between the words. In the case of daisywheel printers, the spacing pitch is altered accordingly under software control. The result is extremely good, with the added advantage that lines are justified even when there are embedded control characters or when using proportional spacing. Neither of these produces accurate justification in the standard Tasword Two.

The program comes on tape and is, in most cases, easy to use. You merely LOAD Tasword, go into Basic, LOAD Taspro and follow the instructions to set it up for your interface/printer combination. You then reload the Tasword Basic, run the program and resave it using the "t" option in the main menu. The program arrives ready-configured for proportional mode on Epson-type dot-matrix printers. The only time you might have any slight difficulty is if you wish to use proportional spacing on daisywheel printers. In this case, there is a certain amount of work to do before you can gaze profoundly on your first, beautifully printed, page.

However, these difficulties are exceptional, and 10 or 12 pitch on daisywheels or Pica and Elite on dot matrix are relatively simple to do. Slightly inconveniently, each different configuration of Tasword has to be saved separately because there isn't room to cover all the possibilities from inside one program. But, to be fair, it is feasible to have a limited number of variations selected from within the Tasword Basic, provided that you do not wish to use proportional spacing.

Although Taspro does not use any extra memory and the size of the text file is not reduced, I feel that it might have been better to put the code in the area used by the help pages. There is plenty of room there for extra code if you do lose the quick reference to the key functions. But we know all these by heart anyway, don't we? By using this area, Ray Eckersley, the program's writer, could have avoided a problem which may affect some people. He has chosen to put his code into the addresses used for the software which runs some Centronics interfaces. You are therefore obliged to use an interface which does not take any of the Spectrum RAM. In my case, I bought the excellent Kempston E and the results are so good that I am glad that I made the decision to do so.

Overall, this is a very worthwhile addition to Tasword Two. Although it may be necessary to do some experimenting when setting it up, the effort is worthwhile and the results nothing short of superb.

Taspro is priced at a very reasonable £3.95, and available from 15 Gloucester Ave, London NW1.