>is it possible for vfp8 to know that the printer is printing without using a timer ?

No; that is a function of the Windows operating system and the print driver. Print jobs are sent from VFP to the spooler, and printed when the printer is available. There may be ways to use some API calls to probe and see if the printjob is done, or did not complete, but I have no knowledge of how that would be done. Perhaps someone else will.