Hi:
I'm really not sure. I -think- I see what you're trying to do, but it doesn't make sense to me to try to "read and duplicate" carriage control characters, which is what it looks like you're doing. I believe that with "batch" output, such as what you're doing, that the OUTPUT element may still be affected by BODY or CONTAINER.
But, even so, if ASIS=ON did not have a visible effect when you used it in the BATCH element, then I think your best bet for help is to contact Tech Support. I think, but don't know for sure that the output and kind of blank lines that you are writing with your code may be suppressed in 1 of 3 places (or more):
1) suppressed as SAS writes the file to PDF on your mainframe system
2) suppressed as the file is FTP'd in binary mode
3) suppressed as the newly FTP'd file is opened by Acrobat on the other platform
It probably doesn't do any good for anyone to test this kind of program on the PC because with FTP being involved, it's very hard to know how or where the blank lines are being written out. For example, in a totally unrelated instance, there were ways of generating output using SAS/IntrNet that would generate blank lines when the output was written to the LISTING window, but would suppress the blank lines when ODS HTML was used.
I think that Tech Support should get consulted on this one.
cynthia