To define your own special characters create a file called qtform containing one line of six characters:

where char1 is the replacement for the ~, char2 is the replacement for the ^, and so on. You can include blanks (spaces) in the list of characters, but these mean that the special characters they replace will have no special meaning at all to pstab.

The characters:

on g statements, and the characters:

in element texts determine how the column headings are laid out on the table. These characters are defaults which you can change if you want. There are several ways of doing this, but in all cases you must always define all six special characters, in the order they are shown here, even if some of them are the same as the defaults.

Replacement of special characters may be defined globally for all jobs, or individually for particular jobs by placing the new characters in a file in one of the following locations:

To define your own personal defaults, use the environment variable QTFORM.

Quantum searches first for the environment variable, then for qtform at the project level, and finally for qtform at installation level, stopping at whichever one it finds. If none of these exist, Quantum uses the default characters.

If you want to use the environment variable QTFORM rather than creating a file, just list the six characters as the value of the variable in the usual way. If the list of characters contains blanks you must enclose it in double quotes.

If the file or character list contains more or less than six characters Quantum issues an error message to this effect as the tables are formatted and uses the built-in defaults instead. If this is the only error, you can correct the value of $QTFORM and rerun the job with quantum –o.

This example replaces the curly braces and the pipe symbol with a colon, a semicolon and an ‘at’ sign respectively. All other characters are unchanged:

This example contains blanks for the { and } characters. If pstab reads these characters on a g statement it will print them as part of the column heading rather than reading them as left and right justification symbols:

This example illustrates how to prevent the characters | and ! from having special meanings in element texts. You might want to do this if you need to print these characters as part of the element text: