I need to dump certain contents of a database in plain ascii format, and apply
formatting tags to it.  The dump file is then tweaked a bit in a text editor,
and loaded into Adobe FrameMaker for final production.  This could be easily
accomplished in RB DOS with simple reports, but I'm finding that it doesn't
work so well in RB 7.81 where the reports have a graphical aspect that gets in
the way.

The problems:

1.  Blank lines appear in the dump at seemingly random places

2.  Some data is clipped (e.g., "John Smith" might appear
as "                     ith"), again in seemingly random places

3.  Occasionally an entire line will be dropped entirely

4.  Occasionally the dump will be corrupted in places

My dump report uses only a report header, a break header, and a detail section.
Here's the scheme:

RH   Label
BH   Label (Formatting tag A)
BH   DB Text
D     Label (Formatting tag B)
D     DB Text
D     DB Text
D     DB Text
D     Variable Label (some concatenated DB Text)

It seems that by allowing plenty of vertical white space between the five lines
in the detail section, I can eliminate the clipping, dropping and corruption. 
However, this increases the number of random blank lines.  And I'm left feeling
uncomfortable with the integrity of the output.

I'm using the following command to print the report:

PRI D05_GEO where DOD is null +
order by zip_5, lastnam, firstnam, adr1 +
OPTION TXT +
|FILENAME E:\ORCIS_PR\GEO_DUMP.DMP +
|OPEN ON

(I notice that when I print to a file, the file does not contain page breaks,
although the progress dialog is counting pages.  There doesn't seem to be any
way (or perhaps any need?) to set a continuous length file.  I've got the
margins set to 0 and that seems to work OK.)

Surely there must be some way for RB to just spit out clean, simple and
error-free tagged ascii text the way it used to.  Am I missing something?

Many thanks.

Tom Hawley
New York
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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