Five fonts come with the package, and are loaded in as required. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you wandering round in the font edttor and coming up with a custom face...

Qualitas is another useful little software add-on from Seven Stars Publishing. With Qualitas and an EPSON RX80 compatible dot matrix printer, using quad density graphics allows you to print text that would make anyone with a more expensive printer very jealous indeed. Qualitas works by doing a double pass of the print head. Before the second pass a very small linefeed is carried out, resulting in the second print pass being offset, creating output that comes close to that created by a Near Letter Quality (NLQ) printer.

Besides adding a NLQ emulation mode to your printer, Qualitas includes a printer character editor which permits you to design typefaces to your own specifications. Suddenly, a straightforward RX80 printer become capable of doing wondrous things, even joined up print! The editor takes into account the double print pass and gives you a maximum 16 x 32 matrix to design your character on.

SEVEN STARS have also included their much praised justification program in the package, which makes it excellent value for money. This automatically justifies the print fine by spacing the words out with pixel accuracy — a major upgrade on the character space justifying employed in Tasword II.

Although Qualitas overwrites the Tasword II HELP pages you can still use the emphasise and underline printer tokens. The character editor is straightforward enough to master, and the output that can be generated, with the right character set, should make quite a few daisywheel printer owners green with envy. This is an essential piece of software for anyone with an RX80 printer and Tasword II — Tasword III owners needn’t despair too much: a version for their program should be available by the end of July for £8.95, or as an upgrade from the Tasword II version for £4.00.

Seven Stars Publishing
Price: £7.95

NEXT NICHE...

A physog stashed away inside the memory of a Spectrum and output via a standard dot matrix printer — the kind of thing you can get up to with SUNSET’s £129 video digitising equipment

Next month we should be able to bring you the results of FRANCO FREY’s experiments with a new video digitising package from Sunset. The package includes hardware which allows you to capture images from a video recorder — or a video camera by preference — and software which allows you to play around with the grey scales in the picture once it is in memory. Franco has had hours of fun digitising piccles of his favourite film stars and is set to bring a full report on the equipment into the office in time for the next NICHE. We’ve just heard about a new kind of printer ribbon that allows you to make iron-on T Shirt transfers, so it may be possible to wear your face on your chest!

Meanwhile DOMINIC HANDY has got his hands on a copy of The Word from The Edge and is champing at the bit to provide a run-down on Spectrum word processors. We’ve saved the review of Frel’s Digit Spectrum Plus keyboard kit for the wordprocessor round up, so you’ll just have to wait a mite longer for that one!