It all depends..

There are people here who still write internal described printer files.

Tools like 2e, Lansa, Magic and so on provide a higher level.

RLU is the IBM approach – clunky and quirky

My own favoured approach leans towards Phils comment

- first write yourself some clean, understandable, well structured DDS for a printer file. Include in it the keywords you may only use ‘sometimes’
give it a structure for Header, Sub header, body text, sub footer, footer, end of report. Provide standard totals fields for .number of records and so on

- comment out a whole load of that stuff

Use it as your template for any printer files. Even at the cost of doing a bunch of moves in the code from your database fields to your standard fields

exsr print total

printtotal begsr
Eval PrtTotal = Total
Eval Col1 = ABCDE
Eval Col2 = DEFGH
write total

ensdr

- that kind of thing

But then , I still normally use 2e, so I never have to care about all this frothy detail of getting presentation stuff together – the database design is the thing – all else should flow from it on auto pilot.

Is it better to directly write DDS/layout than to use RLU…
I’m completely new to this area…

Thanks,
Nutan