I'm going to jump in here Dan because Andrew is busy fighting fires today.
Yes you can add all sorts of customization to the layout of a report. Some of the more common ones can be added right from Workbench/Design Preview combination, and if you need more, you can open up the actual vfp report editor and customize it to your heart's content. Here's how it's done:
To customize the layout from the Workbench ...
To change the appearance of an item, select the item in the selected list of the Select Data Items tab (or select it in the detail line of the "live" Design Preview, right click, and choose Change Appearance. You'll see all sorts of options for customizing that appearance of the item. Click the Apply button when you're finished to apply the changes to that one report.
If you have an Administrator license activated on your PC (you do if you have a Developer Edition installed there), you can check the Update Dictionary checkbox and those appearance changes will be made permanently to that Data Item's definition in the dictionary when you click Apply.
If your report sorts and groups detail lines, and you want to add some common formatting to each group, click the Sort and Group Results tab in the Workbench, and then click Group Options. You'll see a number of Appearance options there. Alternately, you can accomplish the same thing by right clicking on the grouped item in the right-hand list (labeled Current Sort/Group) or on the group header in the live Design Preview, then clicking Group Options.
If the options above provide enough customization options for you, doing it as described above is the recommended way to go.
If you need more though, you instead can open the vfp FRX editor and precisely customize the report to your liking.
Customizing the layout via the vfp FRX editor.
Click the Specify Output tab of the Workbench. In the Layout section in the lower left hand section of the tab, click Edit and the FRX editor will open.
This is the last resort method of editing a layout. Here is why.
Foxfire! normally generates an FRX every time it runs a Request, except in one case. When you change a layout through the Workbench/live Design Preview, the specs are permanently saved in the Request Definition. So whenever you make changes to the Request, the FRX is regenerated the next time you run it and always stays in synch with the Request. When you go back to Request and make additional changes via the Workbench /live Design Preview, all the earlier untouched Customization is reapplied automatically.
By contrast, changes made via the FRX editor are saved as a customized FRX that is associated with the Request Definition. But the specifications for the changes are not stored in the Request defintion itself. So if you were to go back into the Workbench / live Design Preview and change the Request definition, Foxfire! would regenerate the FRX to synch it up to the changes and your previous customizations made through the vfp FRX editor would be overwritten by the regenerated FRX.
Normally, when Foxfire! sees that a Request has a customized FRX associated, it will you that making changes will blow away the customized FRX. So you are then faced with the prospect of having to go back and re-apply your changes. So the rule is, once you customize an FRX, don't ever make layout changes via the Workbench again.
Foxfire! has functioned this way since v1.0 was released 15 years ago. The new report writer in VFP 9 enables us to resolve this shortcoming by adding round trip editing, which we intend to do in the next major release. But for now, you must live with it.
Andrew may jump in here with more, but this is the jist of it.
There are some line drawing capabilities in the Appearance tab of the Group Options dialog. These are active for group headers or footers. Otherwise, you will have to customize the FRX. But tell us what you are looking for if enough people ask for something similar or related, we'll try to find a way to put it in.
You can submit your ideas in the discussion forum called Features and Enhancements.