>Hello,
>
>We have a legacy DOS system. For various reasons, we're trying to recomplie our DOS code in VFP. (I know, it's ugly and not recommended but I don't have time to explain our reasoning.) Anyhow, everything seems to work fine except the use of ??? to send control codes to the printer.
>
>For some reason, the first use of ??? causes a page eject. After that initial ???, all the other uses of ??? work fine.
>
>You can see this from the command window with the following:
>
>set printer to name getprinter() && select your printer
>set printer on
>
>? "This is line 1"
>??? (control code)
>? "This is line 2"
>??? (control code)
>? "This is line 3"
>
>set printer off
>set printer to
>
>In that example, the first line would print, the page would eject and then the next two lines would print ... each line being affected by the preceding printer control code.
>
>Has anyone out there found a way to get ??? to work in VFP or have a clue as to what might be happening?
>
>Thanks for whatever help you can offer!

The problem is that issuing a ??? after starting output using ?/??, which respond to the GDI, will cause Windows to close the existing print stream and open a new one. A few simple solutions exists - either change all your ?/?? to ???, adding the necessary CHR(13) + CHR(10) to the output stream for a ? to force a new line, direct the printer output to a file, and when printing is complete send it to the print port using CopyFile() (see my entry in the FAQ on how to copy a file to a port or UNC), or, if your behavior is consistent that subsequent ??? do not force a page feed, try something like:

set printer to name getprinter()  && select your printer
set printer on

<b>??? ' ' + CHR(8)  && send a space, followed by a backspace</b>
? "This is line 1"
??? (control code)
? "This is line 2"
??? (control code)
? "This is line 3"

set printer off
set printer to