>Thanks a lot for the encourangement to bite the bullet, Dan and Dragan.
>
>As I said before, my customers often print checks in dot matrix printers and I want that printing to be done in character mode and not graphic mode, if that is what they are called. In the past I've accomplished that by saving report to disk ASCII and then printing the file, which would bring me right back to the beginning problem of control characters.
>
>We could have different frx's for dot matrix and laser, but I'd prefer not to do that.

This means you're back to DOS printing, if you want to stay with character mode. In that case, you may really stay with @say printing for dot matrix; for lasers, however, I may still have some code somewhere which was replacing Epson's ESC/P protocol characters with PCL in the text file (I also always sent my prints to text files, and then the user could choose to look them up onscreen or send them to print), but it had the trouble of being quite unreliable in positioning. The text with ESC/P replaced with PCL would occasionally print the underline over the last detail line (not under it). Still, I think it wouldn't work with GDI printers - the cheap inkjets, for instance.

You may do your reports in FPD (for dot-matrix printers) and they should print as they are, just as long as you don't edit them in VFP.