Stephen,

NOTE: "[" and "]" subsitituted for less than and greater than chars in following reply.

I would consider using the TEXT MERGE and TEXTMERGE() features of VFP which are extremely powerful.

If you want to generate an HTM or Word based output, you could save your letter as HTM and insert [[myfilter( textmerge)]] expressions in your HTM output. You can also save a Word document in a RTF format and insert your [[myfilter( textmerge )]] expressions in that output as well.

With both these techniques you will want to create a myfilter() function that will delimit any special chars used in the HTM or RTF formats. For example, if your expressions have "[" or "&" chars in them, then your myfilter() function should convert these chars to "< and "&" when creating HTM output and if your RTF content contains chars like "\", you will want to convert these to "\\" chars. These are just examples of the type of filtering you will need to do.

Perhaps someone can jump in with a more exhaustive list of chars to filter for each type of output you want to generate?

Malcolm