Those preview images look to me like it may be due to the color. You might be seeing dithering to make the background be a little dark.

Can you add color references to the @ ... SAY line which will override the color. Use COLOR RGB(0,0,0,255,255,255) I believe (been many years), but regardless it should be black on white, possibly COLOR "n/w+" (been many years :-)).

>All -
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>So I tried all suggestions so far and of course TRIM and CHRTRAN() work as expected; unfortunately that doesn't resolve the issue.
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>I don't see how the issue is in the PRG that generates the report, as it's called from two places--one exhibits the problem; the other doesn't. I feel it has to be an "environmental" setting (e.g., so SET setting).
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>This is a tough issue to describe textually, so attaching two screengrabs here. One is from a scan of the actual printout, showing the "double dots" issue where EVERY space is replaced by ":". The other shows a "print" to a PDF, where the "field's footprint" is highlighted in grey.
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>Really appreciate any other thoughts... This is an odd one!
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>Many TIA!