>Currently, we send out critical letters and we use PCL5 for formatting (e.g. bold, margins, etc.) We have customized templates that include the PCL5 and merge fields that VFP can replace items like name, address, etc.
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>But, PCL5 is a PITA and not all printers support PCL5.
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>In the past at a different shop I used West-Wind and GhostScript to create PDF files. But that was using the VFP report writer. What we have now is straight up text that is kind of marked up if you will. I think that we are stuck with the text and won't be able to use VFP report writer.

Forget about that, I tried to go that route, as I remembered how fast ghostscript was, it could convert any .ps file into anythng else - pdf, jpg, png, you name it - within a fraction of a second, but had to gave up. The postscript driver is the problem. Adobe killed it before ever producing a version which could be installed on 64-bit windowses.

>Does anyone know what we can do to turn manipulated text strings into PDFs?

For that we used office automation - any Word after 2003 or maybe 2007 has a pdf output from the box, with the caveat that they've changed their silly little minds about automation - it consumed memory progressively, so if you're doing more than a handful of files at a time, better kill Word and create a new instance after a while (my conservative guesstimate as of nine years ago was about 20 files).

Or buy a component - TextControl or the other one, both german and costing about 500-700€ - which will do that for you while remaining rock stable and doing hundreds of files. Of course, they are both visual controls, so if you want to have text processing in your app, they can do that too.