Hi All:

We have a need to send some pre-formatted text out to one of several possible network printers from a VFP application, Win95, NW-4.x. The pre-formatting includes printer control codes to achieve bold/underline/small/etc. The FP-DOS program that this replaces simply does a SET PRINTER TO xxx, SET DEVICE TO PRINT, ?? memvar, etc... As expected, when attempting this from VFP, Windows 'eats' the printer control codes and they just get printed as garbage characters.

Referring other threads, we have been able to simply create a text file (using STRTOFILE() or equivalent) and then COPY FILE xxxxx TO PRN. That works fine, but only works for the Windows default printer. In the new VFP program, we need to unattended send this output to any of several known printers, for which a printer icon/device will be set up on the workstation where this process runs. We have NetLib, and use it in the FP-DOS program successfully, but haven't been able to get it to work as desired for this purpose in VFP/Win-95/NW-4.x. There may be issues of different NW 'contexts' that muddy the picture even further. Also, we have had enough problems with the VFP version of NL that a pure VFP solution would be preferred, but at this point any solution is welcome. If we had more time, perhaps an Word/OLE automation approach would be feasible, but none of us here is fully conversant with doing it yet...

Any suggestions? Deadlines loom, and the extent of the brickwall has taken us a little by surprise...

TIA

Rob