Thanks guys.
Bill, I did in fact look at the library and saw the same stuff you did but wasn't entirely sure how to interpret it. Your explanation is helpful, although I would need to spend some more time with the 44780 documentation to really understand it (I am not a c++ guy, either).
Don do you have any example sketches for LCD control that don't use the LiquidCrystal library? I would like to see what the 'raw' commands look like. I also have the tendancy to want to understand things at the lowest level, but have to trade that off with how much time it takes to get that understanding. I am not a neophyte coder, per se, but am pretty new to Arduino and anything c++ish
I'm still not clear on why my 27th character ends up in the middle of the 2nd line, but it sounds like that is irrelevant since one way or the other I will need to figure out when I have written 40 characters to the first line and then start shifting all of the RAM one position to the left (my strings are typically 25-50 characters long and I am essentially trying to display them one after another so I have basically an 'endless' string). As a matter of fact, I might just start writing the first character to the 40th position and then start shifting. My only question is whether I will be able to loop through 40 positions (x2 lines) fast enough.
Richard