| Big Letters: The ENLARGE Procedure | A SuperBASIC procedure, ENLARGE, that draws enlarged text on the screen with BLOCK by reading the character patterns of the QL's built-in fonts, taking the string, character spacing, width, height, X and Y position and colour. A short demo (lines 120-230) writes QL_DOC and "Le bulletin QUEBECOIS pour QL seulement" in big shadowed letters and cycles the colours with RECOL. | Sinclair QL, Type-in program |
| Clavier_exe: A Québécois Keyboard | CLAVIER_EXE, a multitasking 68000 job by Réal Gagnon that makes French accents easy to type in Quill, typewriter-style: an apostrophe, double quote or caret before a vowel produces the grave accent, diaeresis or circumflex, and the £ and ~ keys give é and ç. The article explains the QDOS job header, MT_PRIOR and MT_SUSJB, the keyboard system variables and IO.QIN, and why the fixed addresses will not work on a Thor. The commented assembler source and a SuperBASIC DATA loader that saves the job with SEXEC are listed, followed by short notes on QDOS multitasking (EXEC, EXEC_W, SEXEC, RESPR). | Sinclair QL, Type-in program |
| Letters (INPUT<->OUTPUT) | Jean-Claude Touzin passes on Peter Chambers' advice for running Front Page with Taskmaster (start it from SuperBASIC instead), notes that Turbo Quill with Speedscreen is hardly faster than Quill with Speedscreen, and reports that his Sinclair QL Printer on SER1 is really a Seikosha 800. The editor adds that the Sinclair-badged printer has a different ROM for characters above 127, and that Seikosha belongs to Seiko, which also owns Epson. | Sinclair QL |
| QL User Profiles | Answers to the QL_DOC reader questionnaire from two active QL users. Pierre Gaudet of Québec, a teacher, describes his 640K QL with a Matthew Zenkar MZ512K expansion, Cumana disk interface and Tandon drives, ICE ROM, Sears RGB monitor and Star NX-1000, and his wish to learn assembler. Jean-Claude Touzin of La Sarre lists his two QLs with Miracle Expanderam, Spem keyboard, QFlash and Toolkit II, prefers SuperBASIC, and asks for short listings and commented machine-code lessons. | Sinclair QL |
| REMark: Looking Ahead to 1989 | Réal Gagnon's outlook for 1989: PC compatibles strengthening their hold (the Amstrad PC-200), trouble ahead for Atari, the Amiga keeping Commodore going, the Z88 needing a price cut, and growing support for the QL as the 2068 declines. He hopes for an affordable hard-disk controller and a North American Sinclair club that could distribute public-domain QL software. | Sinclair QL |
| Sinclair News | News items: the US magazine Update now covers the QL regularly (about 50 pages, half QL and half 2068, $15 US for four issues); Harvey Taylor's Q_Link 1.555 communications program from Meta Media Productions becomes shareware, with registration at $18.75 CAN; and a quotation attributed to Amstrad's Alan Sugar in the magazine L'Actualité. | Sinclair QL |
| Software Review: QATS | A review of QATS from COPE (Gordon Henson), a keyboard-driven program launcher and file utility, translated and adapted by Pierre Gaudet from J. R. Downie's article in Quanta (January 1987). Compared with ICE, QATS offers a user-defined tree of pull-down menus, EXEC or EXEC_W launching, alphabetical file lists, powerful wildcards, group copy and delete, Psion printer-driver switching and RAM-disk formatting, but needs a memory expansion and cannot rename files. A postscript announces a QL club forming in Québec City. | Sinclair QL |
