Hi Jeff
been down that dark road and was wrecked! nobody seems to know anything about that dark and shadowy area of vfp. i also use a dotmatrix in an app doing similar stuff to you and this is the only way to get anywhere near to what you need:
make print_times a public var in your setup prg and don't set it to 0 anywhere in your app. it is the ??? that spits out the blank page, so you will have to live with one blank at the beginning of the day. with print_times being public, you can use the ??? in other parts of the app too without the blank page. there are limitations. it works best with the dot matrix printer attached to the computer that generates the document you want to print. if printing on a network, all sorts of 'funnies' start creeping in again. you have to go out the app, capture the printer port where the DM printer is, print, and then end capture again. I am not aware of any vfp function/commands that can do this from within vfp (i WISH!!!). there are also differences in results on w95/85 and NT when printing to a network printer. if you need more help, email me at jcmca@onebox.com and i will gladly assist. as chief software architect i would love to get my hands on uncle bill - this stuff cost me weeks to work out and a forest of trees. and in C or something it should be a piece of cake or a walk in the park.

TO ANY GURU'S OUT THERE:- Please write us a decent reliable function/library that can do this stuff and give us more time to rid the world of beer. please.

if print_times=0
set print on
??? " "
print_times=1
else
set device to print
endi

DATA

eject
set device to screen
set cons on