>I never quite understood what his Visual Documents product does
It is a VFP RTF parsing library

>although I assume it allows for precise form layout.
Not really. I do all of my document layout in Word. VisDocs is not a layout tool or even visual for that matter - there is no editor. Basically, you create insert points in your RTF. They can be single points, blocks, tables etc. Then you can merge your data in via program control, conditionally access/omitt merge blocks, if you have dynamic data, you can loop through it adding rows to table constructs on the fly etc., etc., I have creating dynamically sizing insurance proposal forms, policy wordings etc., and the nice thing about all of this is that I can catch the output in an RTF file, covert it to DOC format, e-mail it, fax it, print it, convert to PDF. So VFP reports can be created in VisDocs and output via Word etc., I layout complex documents in Word using tables with their borders on/off. This is like laying out HTML in HTML tables in Web pages to get the overall design. I think most VisDocs users use the product for easy data-merge without having to resort to Word automation, as it is way faster than straight Word automation and for a VFP type report, it will easily allow you to have parent data and multiple child data streams in the same report which is not possible in the VFP report writer, unless, of course you are Cathy Poutney <s>.

>Is that a ActiveX? also?
No, it is a VFP program based class library with a supporting FLL.