Label: 5th Dimension, 21 St Mary's Way, Aldridge, Walsall, W. Midlands
Price: £1.99
Reviewer: Andy Moss

How often have you dabbled about with your Spectrum, maybe tried writing your own Quill Adventure or designing a Basic or machine-code program and been pleased with the results but disappointed with its presentation.

It's all down to that standard Sinclair character set - it's just plain ordinary.

With this first release from new boys 5th Dimension, you can dress up your character set in either one of 23 different fonts, or design your own.

Once loaded (it is in fact quite a short program) you get a menu which lets you either Load in a preset font, redefine it, or Load/Save a new one.

Having viewed all the ready-made fonts I have to say that a lot of them are just variations on a theme, ie big and fat, small and fat, big and thin, small and thin, etc. There were two that I found very attractive - italics and army-style chunky.

Defining your own type is reasonably painless and is based around using a grid of 8 x 8 squares, and the combination of on/off pixel plotting. When prompted all you do is enter the number for each row in turn in either binary or decimal. It would have been a nice touch, if instead of using graph paper as the authors suggest, you could use the graphic facilities of the computer and have a graph on screen with a mobile cursor to plot the pixel - but, there you go. Once you've defined your new font style, move it to the address you need and save it using the menu and, of course, to cassette.

Tired of the Boring Sinclair Font is a pleasant utility using just 3/4K.

At the moment the program is only available via mail order.