★ APPLICATIONS ★ PAO/PRESSE ★ Qualitas Font Pack|Amstrad Action) ★ |
Qualitas 464 | Qualitas | Qualitas Font Pack / Qualitas Plus Utility Pack | Qualitas Plus |
Some time ago, Qualitas was released, a program that enables you to change the typeface of your dot matrix printer to whatever you wanted. Some examples were included with this - now yet more weird and wonderful fonts have been released. The different packs are three in number. The Display Font Pack features ten fonts. Five have full alphabets, and so can be used for all text. These are Chelsea, Minstrel, Robot, Shamrock and Xenon. The others are Headline fonts, and only have capitals. They can easily be set into boxes for a striking title or slogan. Headline fonts are Robot Bold, York Bold. York Inverse, York Outline and - my favourite - York Shadow. All these fonts look very impressive, but some are tricky to read, notably Minstrel (Schrift or Gothic) and Robot (as used on your cheque book). The other two packs can be discussed together. These feature 16 different font variations of two basic fonts. Pica (standard 10 characters per inch, 80 characters per line max) and Clarion (which is a very ummm. alternative, yes alternative font. Looks good!) Okay, the fonts are Danish, English, French, German, Italian. Spanish and Swedish, plus a "Pi" font, which contains all the Greek characters and more. These eight variations come in Roman and Italic Versions. These different variations are fairly comprehensive, I suppose. The Clarion pack is especially nice, and will ensure that your documents look just that little bit different than others. As for the pica font... I think most printers will already do about seventy per cent of what this offers Still, if your printer doesn't have Pica it could be a worthwhile investment. Bear in mind while I'm rambling on. that you will need Qualitas to utilise these fonts. An eight bit priniter port is also strongly recommended. otherwise the top line of all your letters will be cut off. As for word processors. Tasword 6128 is clearly the best choice, because then you can use that extra 64k of memory. Both standard Tasword and Protext work well enough, though. One genuine possibility if you don't have either the 8 bit printer port or the inclination to get one is to use the built in editor from Qualitas to cut down the characters to the proper level. This will take a fair amount of time and the end result will not be quite as pretty as the standard font, but its the only solution that I can think of. Personally, I think that the display pack when used with an 8 bit port looks excellent. Qualitas drives your dot matrix to its limit at about 240 pixels per inch. These fonts really do show off your printed material. Clarion is a very good font, as any one who has bought Qualitas can testify to. At least one book has been typeset in it, which is quite an accomplishment for a home computer package. Pica, on the other hand, will probably appeal to those who know why they need a complete Pica package. I suppose plenty of clerical orientated people might be interested, but me, I'll just let my printer switch on its own version.
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