First – apologies as it’s 2020, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and I’m asking about odd behavior related to using @ x, y SAY “something to print” commands. No words can describe what I’m feeling accurately in terms of “how did we possibly get here?” lol

I’m troubleshooting an app running under Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2, with report generation code that goes back to FoxPro for DOS days. The troubling behavior is that a given piece of code that is run from two places in the app produces different print output results. The output report is created using legacy @ x, y SAY… commands. If run from one place in the app the output is fine, regardless of going to a PDF “printer” or a physical printer (happens to be an old Okidata sprocket-fed impact printer).

But from the other place in the app where that report can be produced the @SAYs produce semi-odd results:

- When going to PDF the data from the @SAYS print, but the “field” being printed has its background printed as grey… basically the footprint of the field is shown, for the actual width of the field rather than the width of the data. This is even if the field printed is empty (i.e., you see a grey rectangle where the field would print).

- When going to print output, the printer prints the data, but ALL spaces—including embedded spaces—appears as two vertical dots (almost like “:”s), again for the entire width of the field being printed. So “Mary Jones” will print like “Mary:Jones:::::::::::::::::::::”.

I’m assuming there’s some setting that’s different when each of the above paths to the report option is selected. It has been some times since I worked with @SAYs, but I don’t recall any setting in FoxPro that causes FoxPro to “shown the field widths” for layout purposes, etc. All my research thus far has come up empty in terms of explaining / correcting this behavior.

Among what I've tried is running both scenarios, setting a debug when the report code first gets called, doing LIST MEMORY and LIST STATUS to files and comparing them hoping to find some clue as to why this is happening, but none of the differences seem germane.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

TIA, and be well and stay safe!