If you ever want to produce banners up to two metres long on your printer, consider using Stretch. David Somers examines this utility, aimed at the ducational market, but with many other applications

Stretch is a simple utility program enabling banners to be printed out on any Epson-compatible printer (including colour ribbon ones) and the Integrex and Canon colour ink-jet printers. The program is supplied either on one 80 track DFS or ADFS disc, or on two 40 track DFS discs. It works on the BBC B, B+, Master and Master Compact. It is also able to utilise Sideways RAM for data storage, thus reducing the need for disc accesses.

Unusually, the distribution discs are protected. They can be partially copied onto other discs to make working copies for everyday use, but these require the original disc to be inserted at the start of each session.

After booting up, a pretty title page is displayed before entering the WYSIWYG editing screen. The operations are controlled from the keyboard, with the additional facility to use either a mouse or trackerball. The editing screen shows only a portion of the banner, which can be scrolled horizontally as necessary.

Characters are placed onto the banner by selecting the ones required from a display at the bottom of the screen, then dragging them to their desired position on the banner. The characters can be stretched both horizontally and vertically, rotated, and flipped before being placed.

To assist in locating characters, cross-lines can be displayed for accurate positioning. A preview facility can be called upon to show the banner in reduced form, so that you can see more easily how it is progressing. Additionally, block move and delete operations can be performed on the banner's contents as required.

Once a banner has been created, it can be saved to disc for later retrieval, which is achieved using a simple-to-use selection of those available.

When banners are printed, colours are represented as dither patterns by monochrome printers. On colour printers, they are reproduced in full colour. A number of print density options and scaling factors are available, depending upon the printer used.

A number of different fonts, 18 in all, are provided, with an editor to design new ones. The editor is extremely simple to use. Characters are composed of a number of vertices, defining the shape. These can be positioned where required, with rubber-banding aiding the process. Once created, fonts can be saved to disc for later retrieval.

In use, Stretch is an extremely friendly package. The manual is printed in full colour, containing samples of all the fonts available and printouts to show what can be achieved.

Most operations of Stretch can be mastered in a matter of minutes, thanks to the clear presentation of on-screen information and icons. One slightly annoying feature is that the character scaling is shown on screen, but you can't simply move the pointer over it and click a button to change the values; the keyboard has to be used.

All in all, an impressive piece of software.