Thank you Paul and all,

>We do similar things in some of our distributed applications. We allow dot matrix printing but require our users to use a compatible printer. We use an Epson FX-100 print driver and design the reports using the printer driver fonts. Customer's are required to use the same print driver on their machines. Most dot matrix printers have an epson compatibility mode, so compatibility is pretty good. There are some issues with 9 pin vs. 24 pin printers, so you may have to wrangle out some details.

Can you explain in a little more detail, please? Why did you choose an Epson FX-100 print driver instead of a more basic (old) one? Do you think the printer information in the report environment can be changed at run time to the one installed at customer? We'll have to do a census of the minimum common denominator dot matrix printer or font among our customers. Actually plain vanilla is fine in this case (is that called Roman?)

>Using the printer driver fonts in the report gets it to print in a text mode instead of the super slow graphics mode.

This last bit is the super important part. Thanks for the tip.

Alex

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>Good luck!
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>>Thanks a lot for the encourangement to bite the bullet, Dan and Dragan.
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>>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.
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>>We could have different frx's for dot matrix and laser, but I'd prefer not to do that.
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>>Any suggestions? Thanks.
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>>Alex
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>>Alex
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