REVIEWS COURTESY OF ZXSR

Qualitas
by Ray J. Eckersley
Seven Stars Publishing
1986
Sinclair User Issue 53, Aug 1986   page(s) 82

Label: Seven Stars
Price: £7.95 (tape), £8.95 (microdrive)
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Tony Kendle

Anyone looking to buy a dot-matrix printer will know the 'in' thing is 'near letter quality' type.

These NLQ machines work by printing each letter at least twice, slightly altering the dot position to fill in the gaps to produce an effect that will pass casual scrutiny as a typewriter/daisy-wheel print-out.

For those who bought an early machine, or a cheaper one without this facility, including the ubiquitous Epson RX and FX series, salvation is at hand in the form of programs like Qualitas that use a software trick to achieve the same effect. Typically two slightly different graphics dumps of the text are superimposed to produce the 'high quality' effect. This also allows you to print in a variety of founts including ones normally unavailable on your printer and to use proper proportional spacing.

Because the letters are actually drawn on the paper under the control of the computer, rather than using the printer's hardware set, the output is not surprisingly quite slow. Even so, the resulting effect is well worth the wait.

Qualitas, as the name suggests, is designed to work with the Tasword word processor (both tape and Microdrive version are available).

The driving software and one of the founts becomes merged into the code of Tasword itself which does cost a bit of memory. On the tape version you lose the Tasword Help page and 26 lines of text - hardly crucial.

However, this system does mean that it is impossible to switch founts within a document without first halting the printing and re-loading a different fount.

The program comes with five founts already designed, including Pica (10 characters per inch) and Elite (12 characters per inch) which are almost invariably supplied as standard with printers and which should match your normal draft print-out. The other founts supplied are Mercury, Piazza and Clarion. Some near letter quality printers only offer one fount in top quality so Qualitas may even find a market amongst those who want to extend their range.

Altering the founts or designing your own is possible using the fount editor program supplied - it looks just like a user-defined graphics designer except that the blobs aren't square and they overlap.

The program arrives ready installed for the Brother M1009 and the Epson range. The implication is that you should be able to customise it for any truly compatible printer that uses the same system of 'quadruple density bit-image graphics'.

On the whole Qualitas is a value-for-money program that will prove invaluable to many dot-matrix printer owners. Building it into Tasword makes it very easy to use but a stand-alone program that just used the same files might have been more versatile.


REVIEW BY: Tony Kendle

Overall5/5
Summary: A shot in the arm for your printer. Easy to use and great value. The link into Tasword is neat.

Transcript by Chris Bourne

ZX Computing Issue 30, Oct 1986   page(s) 76

Seven Stars
Spectrum 48K/128K & Tasword 2.
£7.95
(Tasword 3 version. £8.95)

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 10 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 customized 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 daisy-wheel, 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.


REVIEW BY: Carol Brooksbank

Transcript by Chris Bourne

Your Sinclair Issue 27, Mar 1988   page(s) 62,63

RAGE HARD!

You wanna know what's hardest in hardware? Once again YS whips out the magic screwdriver in our first hardware round up of '88.

It's been ages since we did a really ripping hardware spread, so we thought it was about time. After a bit of barking at Phil Snout to get his screwdriver out and look at these beasts, we've pulled together a positive cornucopia of hoopy hardware and super software, to turn even the most soft-boiled trainspotter into a hard-boiled egghead.

The star of our show is Miles Gordon Technology's Plus D disk interface, the only real alternative for tape users to upgrade to a +3, from the designers of the Disciple. Check out the review further on.

Other contenders for the hardware crown are the Multiface family from Romantic Robot, the plastic pal who's fun to be with; a couple of wacky Multiplugs for those of you who work all your household appliances from one socket; an aerial switch so you can plug all your computers, game consoles and videos into your telly at the same time; and Computer Cupboard's nifty little Trojan Light Pen for you to scribble on your screen. Worra lorra lorra stuff.

As well as all this hardware, we've got a brain-boggling selection of the most fascinating hardware-based software. So, let's cut the babbling and launch into the reviews.

Qualitas Plus
Seven Stars
£10.95

The worst thing about writing on a Speccy has always been the quality of print you get from a normal Epson type printer. Either you use the quick draft mode (Ooooo) or you have to settle for one typestyle in the NLQ mode. But now all that has changed. You can beef up your printer's output with Qualitas. Originally planned as an NLQ printout program for Tasword files, Qualitas has now had a Plus added, not to mention compatibility with Tasword Two, Three, The Writer and The Last Word. Now you can print out in the five fonts supplied with the basic Qualitas Plus pack, or you can lay out another £5.95 with the add-on Display Pack and have another 10 decorative fonts to play with. Y'see? Quality doesn't have to be expensive.

In summing up, it's nice to see so many good British products in this hardware lineup. There's not many computers you could say that of, and fewer that could match the quality and design of the peripherals represented here.


REVIEW BY: Phil South

Transcript by Chris Bourne

Crash Issue 30, Jul 1986   page(s) 93

TICKLING TASWORD AND CREATING NEW CHARACTERS...

Our resident TASWORD fan, DOMINIC HANDY borrows a dot matrix printer from the office and has some fun with a new utility for users of the well-established Spectrum wordprocessor.

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 15 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 line by spacing the words out with pixel accuracy - a major upgrade on the character space justifying employed in Tasword.

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, 34 Squirrel Rise, Marlow, Bucks SL7 3PN
Price: £7.95


REVIEW BY: Dominic Handy

Transcript by Chris Bourne

All information in this page is provided by ZXSR instead of ZXDB