| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ BUREAUTIQUE ★ TAS-SIGN ★ |
TAS-SIGN (Amstrad Action) | TAS-SIGN (8000Plus) |
Tasman has diverted much of its attention to the PCW and PC market. A look at its latest product, Tas-Sign, illustrates this. It works under CPM Plus, which means only on the 6128 and PCW machines. True, you can still use Tasman's latest on other CPC machines if you have memory expansion, disk drive and can purloin the CPM Plus system disk. And of course you need a printer. The purpose of Tas-Sign is to design posters, notices or banners on screen and send them to the printer - which simply prints sideways on as much continuous paper as you like. Most CPM application programs, Tas-Sign being no exception, require a certain amount of setting up or customization before they are ready to run. Fortunately the Tas-Sign configuration program only needs information regarding the make and model of your printer. Boot up your CPM Plus system disk, insert the Tas-Sign disk and run the configuration program. A list of dot-matrix printers, ranging from an Admate DP-100 to a Walters WM80, will present itself. A keypress is all that is required if you own one of the named printers. If you dont then all is not lost: you can delve deep into your printer manual and supply the configuration program with the codes for setting graphic line-spacing, selecting bit-image graphics and so on. Signing on Run the Tas-Sign program, wait a few minutes for the printer-driver and font files to load and you're ready to start designing posters. The work-screen consists of an options menu at the top followed by five boxed lines. The boxed lines hold your text that will eventually reach the printer. If the mass of on-screen characters is too much to take in, then a glance at the manual is sensible. Rather than having chapters dealing with the commands and what they dd, Tasman introduces you to commands in the form of a series of tutorials - probably the best way to familiarize yourself with a system. There are reference sections once you've mastered the basics. You can simply enter text for your notice or poster once Tas-Sign has loaded; pressing Escape sends all the data to the printer. If you use Tas-Sign in this manner, you'd miss out on many of its wonderful features. From the options menu:
Many other options exist. For example, you can define the spacing between characters - either proportional (spacing between right edge of one letter and the left edge of the next is the same as for any pair of letters), kerned (allows character overlap) or constant. You can also elect to print with double-strike or double-density - both enhance output. Text sent to the printer can be virtually any size: there are options to stretch and lengthen characters. Embedded commands If you want words or characters to print in different styles, heights or even spacing you will need to use embedded commands. You place these with the text. Say you wanted to print "Hello" using the standard font and "there" in Block font: Hello Fblock here. All the options can be accessed using embedded commands. So you can underline, stretch, italicize, and centre to your heart's content. Embedded commands are powerful - with a bit of practice youll be producing quality material. When entering text there are several editing features to assist you. All are accessed by holding Control and tapping another key. Many word-processors have a comprehensive set of cursor-movement keys - so has Tas-Sign. You can also insert text, save or load a document and switch into an alternative character set. The extra characters are useful, giving you numérous foreign letters and symbols. The many printer utilities on the market have some form of editor for the user to produce new characters designs. Not so with Tas-Sign. You are stuck with four fonts. Apart from that small gripe, Tas-Sign performs admirably. Tas-Sign scores in the user-friendly and simple-to-use deépartment: the manual teaches and has handy reference sections. Even the program can be learnt quickly and without too much grief. As for usefulness: if you need to create eye-catching banners or notices then Tas-Sign is more than efficient.
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