Originally, I developed the Report Engine outside of VFP and therefore it has methods such as AddText(), AddShape, AddLine(), NewPage(), etc. built into it. It is more of a Page Rendering Engine rather than a Report Engine. However, what I then did was to code the logic to process VFP Reports unchanged using a combination of a VCX Class and a lot of Delphi code that actually does the formatting and layout of the data onto the pages.

So, this would be more like your older method when you used to output to PCL, however, once you have it loaded into my Report Engine Preview you can view it and ZOOM IN and OUT up to 100,000% and then print it or save it to PDF. You are correct the VFP Report Writer could not do that an any way whatsoever in its current form. However, once you crank out a VFP Report into my Report Engine you can then call other Methods that I have to go to a Page and then layer on more data on top of the Report that was already added. Additionally, you could lay down items ahead of time and then layer the Report Output on top of that. I also plan to add overlays in the future as well so you could load up a form as an overlay and then populate the data into the form. Then you could choose to print or not print the overlay with the report.


> I create a character map/mesh using Excel with extensive cell formatting, and then layer the
> map over some or all of the word document to create a security overlay effect. I used to do
> this in the printer using PCL-HPGL2/Prescribe (Kyocera), but, I couldn't do anything with
> the document until after it had been printed (like fax it, e-mail it etc.,)

> To be honest, I am not sure that a report writer could create this type of document.
> Certainly, the VFP report writer couldn't manage it by a mile. There are plenty of
> Word->PDF tools out there. Its just that a combination of that capability with ehanced
> VFP reporting would be a nice bundle.