★ APPLICATIONS ★ PAO/PRESSE ★ QUALITAS: Print in style|Computing with the Amstrad) ★ |
| Qualitas 464 | Qualitas | Qualitas Font Pack / Qualitas Plus Utility Pack | Qualitas Plus |
IAN SHARPE assesses a program to enhance the output from your printer WHEN it comes to producing hard copy with your Amstrad a dot matrix printer is faster and more versatile than a daisy-wheel. You can easily switch between different print styles and even generate graphics. But there is a price to be paid for this flexibility - print quality. It's usually possible to tell that the characters are made up from lots of tiny dots. Even if your printer has a near letter quality (NLQ) mode, results aren't perfect, especially at the lower end of the price range and with older printers. Qualitas from Seven Stars Publishing is a utility that sets out to improve the output from your dot-matrix printer. It works by generating the characters using the printer's bit image graphics mode rather than the built-in character set. This restricts flexibility and speed somewhat, but Qualitas will support emphasised, condensed, enlarged, double height, superscript and underline. Before using Qualitas you need to install the program for your particular word processor and printer. This is easily done with the customisation utility, and Tasword and Protext are mentioned specifically. There shouldn't be any problem using other packages, but you may have to print text files separately rather than from within the word processor. Qualitas is set up for Epson-compatible printers but you can also cater for printers that use non-standard control codes. Five fonts are supplied with the program, together with a utility to allow you to design your own. Each font comes in two versions, one for the unexpanded Amstrad and another for use with an 8-bit printer port. As you probably know, the Amstrad is only capable of sending character codes up to 127 to the printer port, but most printers will accept codes up to 255. It's possible to buy an add-on that allows you to send codes up to 255 and this is known as an 8-bit port. There used to be quite a few of these advertised, but I was able to find only one at the time of writing. The 8-bit faces wili be better than the 7-bit versions, which are themselves very good. Figure I shows the various type styles available and a comparison with the draft and NLQ fonts of our Panasonic KX-P1080 printer. As you can see, Qualitas bears comparison with the Panasonic's NLQ mode, which is better than a few we've seen. Qualitas doesn't support italics, but the italic control code will switch to an alternative font and Piazza is an acceptable substitute. The only thing to check before buying this program is that your printer is capable of quadruple density bit-image graphics. I was disappointed to find that my own Shinwa CPA80 only caters for single and double density, so I couldn't use it with Qualitas. That's a pity because the Shinwa is in dire need of a program like this. If you want to give your printer a new lease of life Qualitas can be recommended. It won't give you daisywheel quality but it's a distinct improvement over normal dot matrix fare.
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