The Sinclair QL Forum

I have just received confirmation from Accusoft Corporation, Tampa FL (who own the rights to Tasman products), that they are happy for both Tasprint QL and Tascopy QL to be made available as freeware.

These titles have already been preserved so can be added to the Sinclair QL Homepage as soon as Dilwyn gets chance.

Good work

I remember using Tasprint on the Zx Spectrum, it was at the same time as I was studying for my ONC level 3 Certificate in Electronics. It was my first 'wordprocessor' of sorts and it doubled the number of characters across the screen by halving the character width to four pixels. One column in each character being the space between each character, so in reality it was 3 pixels width to each character. I had invested and justified the spending of around £100 (1983/4) in an Epsom 9pin dot matrix printer for coursework. This meant no more thermal printouts from my Alphacom printer.

It was absolutely amazing to printout text I had written directly on to paper. No more writing Assignment work by hand. I have fond memories of Tasprint for that purpose alone. Nowadays we all take typing up and printing where necessary documents, notes, menus and assorts, however then it was an exciting time, even dare I say it wonderous. Even on a spongy keyboard and if memory serves me correctly a software click. I never used Tasprint on the QL as with most it came with Quill.

Well done Rich, nicely done.

Mr_Navigator wrote:I remember using Tasprint on the Zx Spectrum, it was at the same time as I was studying for my ONC level 3 Certificate in Electronics. It was my first 'wordprocessor' of sorts and it doubled the number of characters across the screen by halving the character width to four pixels. One column in each character being the space between each character, so in reality it was 3 pixels width to each character. I had invested and justified the spending of around £100 (1983/4) in an Epsom 9pin dot matrix printer for coursework. This meant no more thermal printouts from my Alphacom printer.

It was absolutely amazing to printout text I had written directly on to paper. No more writing Assignment work by hand. I have fond memories of Tasprint for that purpose alone. Nowadays we all take typing up and printing where necessary documents, notes, menus and assorts, however then it was an exciting time, even dare I say it wonderous. Even on a spongy keyboard and if memory serves me correctly a software click. I never used Tasprint on the QL as with most it came with Quill.

I think I have Tasword in the house for the speccy somewhere. The first printer I ever had, was a black ink only epson stylus 800 which I used on my Acorn A3010.

Tasword on the Speccy was also my first encounter of a word processor ever. Even with those tiny characters on screen it was an extremely useful program - I still went to school those days and spent a considerable amount of money (at the age of 16) on a centronics interface and a Seikosha (7-pin dot matrix) printer.

As Tasword didn't get any of the German Umlauts right, my home assignments were spread with "ae", "ue" and "oe" instead of the proper "ä", "ü" and "ö" But I remember teachers accepting that (with kind of jealously looking expressions, however ).

Tasword never came for the QL - Tasman Software obviously didn't see chances against Quill, I'd guess.

Tobias

Although not Tasword or Tasprint related, I seem to remember writing a program that displayed fonts on the screen (not very original I know ) but then would print them out on an Epsom printer using ESC codes and data in graphics format a line at a time.

What I also seem to remember is that for each character you had to read in columns rather than rows.
And bottom to top in binary, which complicated matters but not insurmountable. It worked and I could print out text in the font selected, rather than getting limited choices the printer had which was mainly serif, says serif, proportional and non-proportional spacing.