Cetin -- This is VERY helpful. I will certainly share any information I garner from this process with you. :) BTW, you seem more inclined to being a partner than a rival.

I have still do not a full or comprehensive grasp of the parsing issue. The data table that the client has contains about 4,800 records with memo field resumes for each of them. Over the last 10 years or so, the client has spent much labor in formatting the text so that it will fit comfortably in a standard Word document using an evening kerned font like Courier New.

The issue is that the client would prefer to use a "prettier" font for reasons of professional presentation. Thus, with a font such as Times New Roman the kerning begins to come into play. It only affects a certain percentage (I have not explored enough of the resumes to determine an exact percentage) of the resumes that are transferred.

I was led to the discovery that setting the SET MEMOWIDTH TO 8192 would allow me to move each line of text from the memo field to the text document without introducing any CR-LF that were not in the original memo text. Otherwise, if the MEMOWIDTH is set to something smaller than a line of text in memo field, when you use the MEMLINE and FPUTS to transfer the line of text, a CR-LF is inserted at the point where the line of text extends beyond the MEMOWIDTH setting.

Armed with your new information I can see several courses of action:

1. On the VFP side I can only get a "feel" for what the end result will be on the Word side. The FONTMETRIC() function only returns general information regarding character width (average and maximum). Character width (as you may already know) is slightly different from character kerning as the kerning is a measure of how far the character extends beyond the stated character width (please refer to http://www.font.net/fonttut.htm for general definitions regarding font structures). Having this "feel" for what the text will do when loaded into a Word document using a particular font with associated point size as well and paper size and margin allowances, will help me determine a "safe zone" for initially selecting font and point size in Word from VFP.

2. Once the memo text is safely migrated to a word document the revelation of the kerning property in Word might allow for more precision and help me narrow the "safe zone" to some more "actual" in nature.

I hope something in this is helpful to you. Thanks for taking the time to respond to my inquiry. Have a super day Cetin.

Larry Rix