>When Microsoft first took over Fox Software, I asked if those _P* variables controlled anything once the report was started and they said "No. They were only used to initialize the internal counters, etc, and were updated at the end." UDF's that manipulated things while the report was running did not appear to have any effect (other then _PAGENO), so they looked like they were correct, but that was back in the FP2.0 days. I haven't tried to do any of that with VFP. There were always other tricks you could do in the report writer to accomplish what was needed, with varying degrees of success. Have you ever tried to get numeric fields to come out as expected in an ASCII report? Ugh, it usually takes few tries to get it to look good. I've killed more than a few trees trying to get reports to look just right, in ANY of the report writers modes, not just ASCII.

Tried the ASCII report couple of times, and simply gave up. I think we'll just keep the DOS versions of the reports in a subdirectory, as far as the conversion lasts, but once we start writing fresh VFP apps, we'd better generate some HTML in cases where some plain-text-version is needed.