title: How do I send control characters to a Windows printer in Crystal Reports?
body: <p>We are trying to build a Crystal Report that sends control characters directly to the printer, without going through the (buggy) Windows driver for that printer. Does anyone know a way to do this from within a Crystal Report? </p>
  
  <p>The specific control character we are trying to send is CHR(2). However when we put that in a Crystal Report, and print to a Generic Text Only printer, it is converting the character to a period on output. The character appears as a box in Crystal's preview, so I suspect it is the Windows driver, rather than Crystal, that is the problem.</p>
  
  <p>The device is a Datamax printer. We do have drivers for it, but are encountering various problems - the infrastructure group knows more about the problems than I do, I don't feel I have enough information to try and ask about the specific problem. It is some combination of the interplay of Crystal Reports, Citrix, our market-specific ERP package, and automatically selecting label printers for the appropriate label size based on user at the time the report is run.</p>