I don't know if this is a known issue or has already been discussed, but I thought I'd share this anyway.

In *VFP 3.0*, Some of my reports would print on a certain printer even if it wasn't the default or even if I chose another printer to print to. It turns out that when I designed the report, it captured the name and location of my default printer (UV Laser1, //LIFO_1_NOVELL/UV_LASER1). Well, when I would run the report and choose a different printer (I use the PROMPT argument), it would STILL go to UV Laser 1! So I decided to delete my UV Laser 1 printer and then it would print to where I wanted it to.

It's as though VFP compares the printer in the header to the available printers and if it finds one it uses that one despite your request to print somewhere else! But if it doesn't find a match, it will then respect your wishes to print to whatever printer you want!!

I would have never discovered this if it weren't for a very certain situation I was dealing with.

I have 7 users and two lasers. I divided the two lasers between them to balance the load. Well, all my reports in my application would always go to laser number 1 even though half the machines default printer was set to laser number 2! I ended up renaming the printers in Win95 to something that didn't match what was stored in the header of the report and it worked. Read on!

Anyway, I used that dirtly little trick to my advantage. I setup my users PCs to use HP Laserjet III drivers for their printers. Works great except for one report. So I setup a new printer with a PCL 6 driver on my machine and called it 'Printer A' for example. I then set it as default and resaved this certain report with that info.

I then setup that same type of printer on my users' machines but didn't set them to default. But when they run that report on their systems, VFP sees that printer and uses it (and thus the PCL driver) and presto!

You may ask why not use the PCL 6 driver always? Well we were running into some technical difficulties with that driver with mass printing so we went with a more universal driver, HP Laserjet III. But one report didn't come out right (my opaque fields wouldn't come out opaque!!).

So if anyone knows why VFP does this, I'd like to know. Or if anyone has experienced this before. REALLY WEIRD!

Hope this helps someone out there!