>The report is being printed on a Fujitsu 3600 (old dot printer to print
>multi copies - ncr paper).
>
>We used to print the report from an ascii file and performance was OK. Now
>we decided to change the format of the report (usual 8.5x11 now) and are
>using the Windows defaults to print. The report is now very slow to print.
>We are looking for a faster printer but in the meantime I'd like to improve
>the printing.

Try the Generic/Text Only Windows printer driver. You may lose some formatting, but you should get the speed back. Otherwise, the printer driver will try to render the report as a bitmapped graphic: that's what's causing the performance loss. Laser printers don't care about this as much as dot matrix ones do.