>Is there any way to stop the expansion of tabs into spaces when creating a >text file using SET ALTERNATE TO? You'd better use Set Text To instead, since it doesn't expand tabs. Additionally, you can use _text system variable, which is a handle to the file open in with Text To, so you can always use =fwrite(_text, AnyString_lc), where AnyString_lc can contain any collection of bytes. The only trouble is that you must handle all the text formatting by hand, but then, Set Alter has the same problem.