>I'm a relative newbie, so forgive me if I'm completely out to lunch, but -- isn't it possible to embed printer control codes in a report? If so, and the output is going to a page printer (i.e. laser), you could issue the codes at the beginning of the summary band to position the output at a precise page coordinate (row/column) of your choice. (Or, put the codes at the beginning of each output field in the summary, if that's necessary to override VFP's positioning of the output.)
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>Isn't it just a matter of using an expression which calls a UDF (which would make use of the "???" command to issue the codes) in an output field?
>I am hoping that it is, since the application that I'm porting to VFP is going to have to do some crazy stuff (like print sideways on a page that contains otherwise normal printing) which I had little trouble with in the ancient DOS application that my clients are using now, and I would hate to think that I'm going to have to face coding all this output by hand!


Well, you can still do it, but the whole idea of working under Windows is that your app should be device independent. Though, when it comes to printing, it narrows down to PCL or ESC/P2 for 98% of everything, so you'd actually have to maintain only two types of printers, generally.

Now if you decide to lose compatibility (or, should I say, generality) and hardcode the long-sausage escape sequences, it's your choice.

Btw, don't use ??? because it will try to bypass the Print Manager and print directly to printer, probably causing a separate print job (and print on another page or misbehave in other fancy ways); use ?? because it should print in between the other report output and be submitted to printing together with the rest of the page.