Foxplus printing using ? in SCO Unix - page ejects after each line

[mduddytel]

We have some print programs that have suddenly stopped working after many years of being just fine. Might be related to newer printers.

The Foxplus programs us ? to output each line, including a font code in the output line to change for titles, subtotals, etc. Recently some (but certainly not all) of these programs have started ejecting the page after each line is printed. Fonts seem to print fine, nothing garbled and output is correct.

But each new line is printed on a new page, on the line it would have been at on the original page. Changing the fonts doesn't seem to make a difference. We can use report in Foxplus but lose some functionality that way.

Any ideas? TIA for your help.

 

[dbMark]

Yes, some otherwise generic functions or calls need to be very sure of the environment - PRINTER, TALK, EXACT, NEAR, etc. As you discovered, if it could be called while printing then it needs to be able to detect and handle that scenario. Or replaced with a simpler and more robust alternative.

I recall one day all our users of a certain app started having errors. Turned out that a common subroutine had used a loop variable without first declaring it PRIVATE. It worked for years because no code called it while using that variable name. One day code was modified and that variable name existed when clling the subroutine. Oops. Fortunately it wasn't my change, it was the team leader's. So we then went through all our common functions and made sure all variables that should have been private were so declared.