Cy:

I have 2 free questions with Microsoft VFP 8.0 so I decided to use up one of them for this item and it is a happy story.

It turns out that after Windows 98 that VFP could no longer give us a custom size to deal with this type of issue, but there is another way (that you would never guess) of dealing with this.

First, you have to have a dot matrix printer driver in your printers control panel and you must have it set as the default printer. Now proceed as follows:

1) Open the Printers Control Panel
2) Click on the File Menu Pad and click on "Server Properties"
3) You will see a Page Frame that already has the tab open at "Forms"
4) Suppose you needed to print exactly 5 one inch labels 4 inches wide in a single column. Then you would check off "Create a New Form" which would open a Form Dimension Section at the bottom. Here you can create a form that is 4 inches wide and 5 inches high. Name the form e.g. VFP_LABEL_4X5
5) OK, you have created a form. Now when you are making the label in VFP, you can now click the "File" Pad, then "Page Setup", then "Print Setup" then click on the "Size" combo box with the list of available forms. If you can believe it, the form you created earlier is now available to you in the size list.

Remember, you must have a Dot Matrix Printer set as your default printer for this all to work. If you change your default to an InkJet Printer, the form sizes you developed will no longer show in the size list.

So what I eventually had to do was to create 10 different form sizes ranging from 1X4 to 10X4. And I had to create 10 different label forms from Lab_1_inch to Lab_10_inch each referring to a specific form size. Then when the application needed to print 3 labels, it would count the labels and run thru a case and call for printing the labels with the Lab_3_inch label.

It is a very laborious process but it works perfectly. The printer stops exactly when it has finished its last label, and starts off at the right place for its next batch of labels.

If the application needs to print 19 labels, it prints one group of 10 and another group of 9.

Now the happy ending. The techician who helped me felt that my question was far enough off the wall that I got no decrement so I still have 2 free questions left.

If this story is not clear, let me know and I will try to explain it another way. Because it works perfectly.

Mike Smith