compressed ecdsa public keys

[Robert Moskowitz]

is there a way in genkey to create an ECDSA P-256 in compressed format 
(now that the patent is well expired)?

I have been looking at openssl docs for genkey, but not seeing it and 
how to then create the proper PEM files with the compressed value so I 
can then use openssl ca to create the certs with the public key compressed.

Thanks

Oh, and and there are a number of things I am doing wrt to 
serialNumber.  Will come back to that ball of twine.