UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

In that case, put it back the way you had it. If the printer can do it, you will get bold. If it can't you won't. This will work with an old dot matrix printer. And that's the last style of printer where I saw this sort of thing work.

The unix man command tries something like this. A formated man page will try to overstrike both for bold and for underlining. (It does char backspace char. It doesn't use cr for this.) To be compatible with all printers, the man command makes sure that the last character printed is most important. So it will do underscore backspace letter. Never letter backspace underscore.

I don't understand very well.
are you saying that i can use carriage return if printer allow to use it?

You are trying to overstrike characters. Some printers cannot do that. I don't know how else to put it.

but, i remember you that the same program (the same), from
mainframe-mvs works, instead from aix-txseries the carriage-return doesn't.
THE PRINTER IS THE SAME

Actually, I had not realized that you brought your printer over from the mainframe. I don't know AIX but I do know ksh. This command:
ksh -c "print 'abc\rdef'"
will print abc, then a carriage return, and then def. Send the output of that command to your printer. Do you get overstrikes printed?

If you don't get overstrikes from that command, then you aren't going to get them from COBOL either. Try the same thing with backspaces:
ksh -c "print 'abc\b\b\bdef'"
Does that work? If so maybe using backspaces in your program would work. If the printer can physically overstrike but it doesn't when connected AIX, it is probably the driver. And you are probably going to have to live with it.

If the ksh stuff does overstrike, but your program can not, then the OS and hardware can both support overstriking. In this case, you would need to ask microfocus.