QualiType

What is QualiType?

QualiType is a workstation-resident Hyphenation and Justification program offering high speed processing at the quality of composition that Penta has long been known for. It is the core of our software.

Basic Composition Features

The QualiType command set contains tools to lay out the composition of your document:

• Full control over font, point size, set size, leading and measure.
• PubLink’s autosorts, a quick and easy way to access special symbols. For example ;sb represents a small bullet.
• Ligatures, kerning and widows can be turned off and on within the same document.
• Through the use of various commands, complete control is provided for uniform adjustment of all inter-character and inter-word spacing.
• Left and right text indents can be specified in several styles, in fixed or unknown amounts.
• Leader fills are straightforward. The fill character is user definable and multiple breaking styles are available.
• Vertical and horizontal rules can be drawn using the box/rule command. This can even produce multi-part boxes to the text depth.
• Cap-height alignment at top of column is easy to achieve by command.

Hyphenation and Enhanced composition

Hyphenation can be turned off and on within the same document.

• Hyphenation is done through logic and a user-defined dictionary. Multiple dictionaries can be used within the same document.
• Conditional hyphenation points can be specified to override hyphenation logic.
• Hyphenation logic is available for English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French Canadian, German, Swedish, Danish and Dutch.
• Typographical parameters can be saved before a temporary change and restored after.
• Quality ragged text can be set using PubLink’s Rag Styles, which guarantee an aesthetic ragged margin with no accidental straight bits.
• Indents, margins and ragged mode can automatically be altered based on the text position on an even or odd page. For example, specifying ragged inside means that the text will switch its ragged margin from right to left as it flows from an even to odd page.

QualiType Formatting Features

PubLink’s formatting refers to our set of tools that streamline document coding. Indispensible to all our users, formats contain strings of commands, making documents more consistent and easy to produce. Formats are similar to word processing styles but offer much more control and functionality.

• Formats can be temporary to the file, specific to a particular job or universal to the entire system.
• Formats can be numbered as in [j41], or named as in <head2>. The latter form, called StyleTags, gives an easy-to-read XML-like document.
• Formats can employ copy merges, which act as switch points between the format string and the text-file input. That is, H&J passes control from the format to the text file and back, changing at copy merges, until the format’s end. This allows one format to accomplish a sequence of tasks, stopping at predetermined points for keyboard input.
• Formats can be called in suspension, to be activated after a specified depth or event such as character, line or paragraph.
• Values can be passed to formats defined with wildcards, which allows their actions to vary.
• Format nesting, branching and looping allow you to write formats that perform complex programming logic.
• QualiType stores key information in system variables, such as the current point size, set size, leading, rag mode, color, page number, indents etc. Applying them as command arguments greatly empowers PubLink’s formatting.
• User variables allow you to store your own numeric or string data. Complete mathematical and compare functions are available for manipulating the data.

QualiType and XML

QualiType, with its in-built pseudo-programming features like wildcard formats, system variables, math operations on user variables, and stored-string manipulation, is the ideal tool for creating complex pages from XML or SGML documents. Combined with the further power of our MasterPage, there is no other composition package available in the industry as powerful for rendering XML into the pages you envision.