Product: Fontaid
Supplier: CJE Micros, 78 Brighton Road, Worthing, West Sussex BN11 2EN. Tel: (0903) 213361
Prices: ROM and Disc (13 fonts) - £31, Alternative Font Discs (three, with 11, 13 and 15 fonts) - £16 each

Few owners of the Canon PW-1080 or Taxan KP-810 and KP-910 printers probably realise that these printers are not only capable of NLQ printing in the usual typewriter style but also an alternative NLQ character set which is user definable.

This alternative NLQ requires a 6264 RAM chip to be fitted in the printer, but is otherwise a standard feature of the machines. The trouble is that the codes to define the characters are both tricky to create and tedious to download. This is where Fontaid comes in. Fontaid is both a character definer and a download utility.

The definer program looks much like any Beeb character definer, except that its character grid comprises 23 by 16 dots. The cursor keys are used to move around the grid, and the space bar toggles a dot on and off in any position. The entire font is displayed next to the character grid, and individual characters can be selected using either their ASCII code or their position on the keyboard, and expanded onto the grid.

Other commands alter the proportional width of a character, shift the grid a line or column at a time in any direction, and print out the font for inspection. Dots cannot be positioned horizontally adjacent as the printers do not allow this. Once the font has been defined it can be saved to disc ready for use with the rest of the Fontaid programs.

Several download utilities are provided, duplicated on disc and ROM. These are variations on a theme. Two (using different workspace areas) enable the printer, download the font, then select it. Two other downloaders perform the same task only if the printer is enabled. This comes in useful when using the embedded codes within a Wordwise document, as it will not then pointlessly execute during a preview.

Other commands are also provided for printing characters, usually reserved for the foreign accented characters, all squeezed up together to form a logo. One command prints characters 0-31 as two rows of 16 characters. The other uses 8-31 in a format of 3 rows of 8, compatible with Watford's NLQ Designer *LOGO format. Fontaid also includes a simple Basic downloader for incorporation in your own Basic programs. A special View printer driver is also included which allows any star command (including the downloaders) to be issued from a View document. The last facility of Fontaid is a program to convert a font file into the printers' ROM format for blowing onto an EPROM and installing permanently in the printer instead of the RAM chip.

Fontaid is a useful buy for any Beeb user with one of these printers. Fortunately, creating your own fonts is simple enough to render the overpriced font discs redundant. With this software an entirely new face can be easily and reliably given to any document.