>Nick,
>
>>>Nick,
>>>
>>>>snip<
>>>
>>>>I have one pure VFP application which does exactly that kind of massive print job.
>>>>
>>>>For every client the necessary set of VFP reports (up to 4 reports per client) is run one-by-one to a separate print files with the names generated with SYS(2015) and extension ".pr1", then they are concatenated with DOS COPY command like this:
>>>>

>>>>lcCommand = "RUN copy /B *.pr1 " + lcPATH + lcOutputFileName	
>>>>&lcCommand
>>>>

>>>>
>>>>The huge output file is then passed to the mainframe printer.
>>>
>>>Right.. I've been thinking about that approach as well. Seems the most straightforward. However, where you have "up to 4 reports per client" we typically will have somewhere between 15-30 pages drawn from 8-12ish reports.
>>>
>>>Thanks Nick!
>>
>>How many clients? In my case one report is typically 1-3 pages (that's the statements) but concatenated report file may be for 8,000 -10,000 clients so it might be around 40,000-60,000 pages.
>
>
>Holy Smokes Nick! That'a a lot more pages than I was thinking about. <g> We're shooting for 1000 aggregate reports per month at each location, each containing something like 20 pages (on average). That gives me about 20,000 pages per month which should be doable by the Xerox printer's capacities.
>
>With 22 business days per month that makes for about 50 reports per day. In a typical 8 hour day that means about one report every 8-10 minutes, which is why we ran into the need to speed the output up.
>
>I guess that resolves the capacity issue though... <g>

I actually added an option to run the reports for certain range of clients in order to reduce the size of print file, before they upgraded that box which controlled the mainframe printer. Otherwise it just didn't fit into their print process that time. :)

It also can print the reports on the normal printer on the network for small cases. For this I hack reports on the fly (they are standalone), changing the printer info in Expr and Tag2 fields.