Label: Gap
Price: £12.45
Memory: 48K
Reviewer: Mike Wright

Despite its name Designer from Gap Software is not another graphics package. Instead it's a two-program utility to help the small businessman cut the cost of his printer's bills by producing rough artwork for his advertising leaflets, posters and cassette inlays.

The designs are built up using the first program of the suite. Five sets of 21 user-defined characters (UDGs) are preset in the program. If this isn't enough the UDGs and character sets can be redesigned or new ones can be created using the second program, a character designer.

When it's running, the top two rows of the Spectrum's 22-row screen display are used to display the current set of UDGs and a third line is used to show the main menu options. The bottom line of the screen is used for the status and subsidiary menus.

The main menu has four options: Mode, Cursor, Functions and Attributes. The three modes are Draw, Move and Text. In Draw mode cursor moves are shown on screen while in Move the cursor can be moved without drawing a line. Creating a design involves a lot of switching between these two modes. Text prints letters in either normal or double-height characters starting at the current cursor position. Selecting Cursor allows you to change the shape of the cursor to that of one of the UDGs. Attributes lets you change the ink and Paper colours for the cursor and apply these colours to part of a row (or column) or to blocks of whole rows (or columns). Functions gives access to the saving, loading and printing routines. It is also used for changing between the sets of UDGs and the Page function.

Only one UDG character set can be used at a time.

While a ZX printer can be used to print out your design it makes more sense to use an 80-column printer. Spectrum screen dumps are about a quarter of A4 size and a Page option has been included so that several screens can be linked together to give an A4 print-out. This is probably the most important feature of Designer.

I found it very frustrating having constantly to switch between modes (particularly between Draw and Move) and swap UDG sets to build up any sort of picture.

Because you can design your own character sets from scratch there would be potential to use it as an electronic circuit-board layout designer or for foreign language applications, for example as an elementary Japanese word processor.

Clearly it has found a niche, although it may not be the one the authors had originally expected.

GAP Software
£12.50

Now I must admit it, I also use a BBC and one of my most useful programs on that machine is Fleet Street Editor. Why am I telling you this? Because I have been waiting for some time for the Spectrum version and it has not been forthcoming.

GAP Software have produced a program which, though limited, will fill the gap (no pun intended) until they do.

It is a graphics program intended as an A4 page poster designer. The program is cleverly programmed so that up to 52 screen lines are printed rather than a single expanded screen of 22 lines, this gives a full, proportional setting on A4 paper.

Printer routines are provided by the program and resident routines as used by the Kempston and ZXLprint 3 interfaces are recognised and utilised if you wish.

Each of the two programs are self contained and can be purchased separately if required for £8.95 and £4.50 respectively, and both have built in routines to transfer themselves to microdrive if so desired.

DESIGNER

This is the program that produces the posters, the quality will depend on you. There is one serious problem in that all graphics have to be created via UDGs. Characters and graphics are dealt with at character square size and this can tend to produce chunky, rectangular results.

However, it is not all bad as, if you have the time and interest, then by putting several UDGs together you can create quite complex graphics. This is more laborious than using a freehand artwork system but just as effective in the final result.

Actually there are 100 textures, patterns and designs built in and ready for you to use, plus three text fonts, certainly enough to give you some inspiration.

CHARACTER DESIGNER

This program is meant to compliment the Designer program in that it allows you to create more UDGs and text fonts for use with it. 10 new fonts and two sets of UDGs are already built into the program.

It can, of course, be used to create UDGs for other programs and for usage other than in Designer.

Both programs make extensive use of menus and are well written and prompted, they are a little bit fiddly to use and the manuals, both produced by Tasword 3 on a small printer yet perfectly legible, seem to be based on the Masterfile manuals in presentation.

I liked it, possibly because I am a sucker for programs which demonstrate to aunt Edna that the computer can DO something, but also because I could never produce good posters freehand.

If creative posters, magazines or artwork, albeit simple, is an area which you want to delve into then try these programs.