Can you make an IFD from an MDF?

Alternately, “I’ve lost my form design files (IFD’s), can I get them back from the compiled forms?”

The answer to the question is no, you can’t.  And I’ll explain why.

When you compile your IFD into an MDF file for use with Central, what Design does is actually generate the appropriate printer code right then and there.  This is part of what makes it so fast – there’s no interpretation from the design to printer language (or PDF) when you produce your output.

What that means is that when Central is using your form all it needs to do is send that already-generated code to the output target.  It also means that the original design is lost in the process.

So, please, treat your IFD’s as irreplaceable – and keep them backed up.

There are a lot of things to remember when you’re setting up to print cheques, even before JetForm gets involved, so let’s run through some of them.The MICR E13B font is not standard in any off-the-shelf printer

You have two choices for the MICR font, and those are to buy (or buy a printer with) a font SIMM/DIMM card that has the font on it, or to use a downloadable font. I have personally had great success with both methods, but if you’re not really comfortable with all the setup of your own printer, then I would definitely buy a pre-configured MICR printer.

The MICR toner you put onto your checks must be ferrous

MICR ink itself is, by definition, magnetic. Or, at least it has Iron in it. It needs the Iron in there so that it can be read magnetically as it passes through a special machine at high speed. Normal printer toner is not magnetic, so you need to get yourself set up with that.

Checks use special paper

Checks are printed on “security paper”. This paper doesn’t just have swirly patterns printed on it, it has UV-readable ink, microprint and lots of other features to make forging or changing a check you print very difficult. You should take great care in purchasing your check paper, and good stuff isn’t dirt cheap.

The best check stock I’ve seen had all the normal security features and it also has a micro-thin plastic coating on the paper. Because of that, as the paper passed through the printer, had toner stuck to it and then fused on with heat, the dark toner particles actually sank down into the plastic and became permamently bonded to the page. Awesome. Most check stocks can have their toner cracked off them if they’re frozen when you try it. (Try it!)

Access to the special toner and paper will need to be controlled.

Seriously. Now that you’ll be printing your own checks, odds are that you will print the signatures as well. If you leave the printer loaded and ready and in an open area, nothing stops anyone from either grabbing some paper or from mocking up checks in Word or something else. It is a security problem.

Most places I’ve been, the printer itself is either located in the controller’s office or is locked in a cabinet into which only certain people have access.

Banks are Very Particular

Once you’re all set to go, you will need to print anywhere from 20 to 100 sample checks and send them to your bank for them to approve of them. They will look for the exact positioning of the MICR line on the check (which aligns from the bottom-right of the check), and they will run them through a reader that will tell them how dense the MICR ink is. If the ink is not dense enough they will not approve your checks. If the ink is too dense, they also will not approve your checks.

The best thing – really, the very best thing – you can do for this is purchase a “MICR Template”. What this will be is a transparent piece of plastic that you can lay over your check to see if things are in the correct places. It might cost you $20 to buy it, but it will save you so much time that not to have one is just silliness.

You can also use one of your current checks and hold them up to the light together. But, in my experience, checks from your bank can have their MICR in quite the wrong place. And though a bank will put up with their own ineptitude, they won’t take it from you. Get the template.

For the density of the ink, we don’t all have MICR readers kicking about. So this requires a bit of faith. I usually start with the density wheel of the printer right in the middle and print a few. Then crank it up by ne and try again. Every printer is different, but eventually you will get to a point where you have nice, dark, black MICR text that won’t have any puffiness or bleeding about it. Nice, sharp, dark text. I’ve always used this eyeball method and I have never had checks refused due to ink density problems.

Finally, once the bank approves of your checks, stick a sample or six on the wall next to the printer. Ensure that people printing checks know that they should have a look at the MICR line every now and then to be sure it still looks like what you put on the wall. Because if you send out a bad batch, your bank can charge you an arm and a leg to process those checks.

In the United States, a good supplier for almost everything I have talked about so far is the Troy Group. I’m sure there are others, but I’ve installed a fair number of printers from Troy and I’ve never known them to fail.

Getting Central to Use Your Built-in MICR Font

Once you’ve gotten yourself set up, you will need to get Design to figure out the fact that you’ve got a new font in there. Either a built-in font or a soft font.

For a built-in font, such as on a SIMM or DIMM or that came in the printer, there will be a “PCL Escape Sequence” that you can use to call that font. This strange-looking string of characters will be in the manual that came with the printer. Not the HP or Lexmark manual, but the manual from the company that added the MICR functionality to the printer.

–> From here on out, we’re talking only about PCL print drivers. PostScript and everything else isn’t in the discussion.

It might look like: Esc(0QEsc(s0p8.00h8.8v0s0b0T or something similar to that.

There will be a Primary and a Secondary string. If there is no Secondary given, just use the Primary for both. Both what? Well, both entries in the font cartridge!

The name “font cartridge” harks back to the day when it actually was a cartridge. Now it’s a file, and you can create it in Notepad. Your MICR font on the printer will have a name. For now, we’ll assume that name is “MICR E-13B”.

Create yourself a new file and call it “MICRE13B.L4″. The L4 is the extension used for PCL font cartridges. Trust me.

Open that file up in notepad and paste this into it (we will edit it):

That first line that says “Font” is the name of your font. The space in the name is replaced with a % sign. Put your font name there (leave the word “Font” and a space) and use as many %’s as you need to for spaces in your font name.

The point size, pitch, family, lines per inch and everything else but the last two lines is absolutely correct for MICR, so don’t touch any of it.

The last two lines are your escape sequences. Enter yours instead of mine. Notice that “Esc” turns into “\E”, and remember that these things are CASE-SENSITIVE. I have seen some particularly cruel strings that have O (letter o) and 0 (zero) in them…be very careful, and watch for an O that might be a 0 and vice-versa.

Then you can save this file. Where, you ask? Well, there is a config directory beneath the directory that your copy of Design is installed in. Save this in there.

Selecting Your New Font Cartridge

If you had Design open while you did all that, close it down now. Then start it up again.

Go into your printer setup (you’re not using a Windows driver…right?), highlight your printer and click the “Font Setup” button at the bottom of that dialog.

In the list of available font cartridges, you will now see yours listed. Select it in addition to the ones already selected and click OK to close the dialog.

Your font is now available for use. It won’t look right, but it will be the right size.

So now you can get to the business of making a check!

A Note on Soft Fonts

If you elect to use a soft font, all you need to do is find a TrueType version of the MICR E13B font and set that up to use in Design. That’s all documented, so I won’t cover it here.

Questions?

If there are questions about this, feel free to post comments.

First, you might be starting off your installation with a pre-packed web archive – which would be one file – or an expanded directory of files.

If you have the single file, you’ll want to run that first and expand it somewhere as follows. If yours is already expanded, skip down three screenshots and start reading again.

If you have the single file, it will look much like this. Just double-click it to start it off.

You will then see this message. We’re only expanding files at this point, so say yes.

Choose a place to unpack that you can find again. The default location will be pretty confusing, so I chose C:\OutputDesigner.

You will then receive the real installation screen. Click the “Exit” at the bottom-right corner.

Then you will have a directory with your unpacked installer files in them.

Now you want to Right-Click the main setup.exe application and choose “Run as Administrator” from the popup menu.
You may be asked to provide credentials or to allow the action, in which case you should do that.

This runs the main installer again, from which you can choose to install Output Designer as you normally would.

Once you get it installed, you’re good to go!

Here I will attempt to explain how you can change logos on the fly using nothing more than a piece of information from your data file.

Determining What You Can Key On

The first thing you need in your data file is something that you can use to determine which logo/address/whatever block you want to use. Whatever this is, you have to be sure that you know what all the possibilities for it are. We can get around nothing being there, but we can’t get past an entry you didn’t anticipate.

So here are some good places to look:

• Warehouse or Plant codes: Things like “MP”, “ZX”, “BQ”, etc.
• State or Provice: TN, MO, CA, AL, NL and so on.
• If things are numbered, so much the better.

If you don’t have any of those, all is not necessarily lost. Some places will use different company names. If you have “John’s Radiator Service”, “Eastside Plumbing Corp.” and “United Radiator Supply” you could use a TDF (transformation) to extract just the first 4 characters and end up with “John”, “East” and “Unit”, which will work just fine for our purposes.

The main thing to remember here is that whatever you pick should indicate which variation you need to be printing, and it can’t have any spaces in it.

For the scope of this sample, I won’t describe how to make a TDF to do this. I will assume that we have a data file with a field in it already that contains the information we need. And we’re going to use three plant codes for our examples: “P1″, “P2″ and “P3″. I’m going to call this tidbit of information our “Key”. Pretty simple.

Getting That Into a Variable

To be able to print a form with a variable logo on it means that our logos will have to be on subforms. There are other ways to do it, but this is the simplest and works well anywhere up to about 20 different logos/address blocks…so that’s what I’ll explain.

You need to get your Key into a variable that will be available no later than the subform with your logo on it will need to be printed. This could be by the end of the first page (if you intend to place the header last before going to the next page) or it could be at the start. My personal preference is to incorporate the variable as it is needed on the very command line to JFMERGE. That way, it is available even before the form itself loads, so we’re guaranteed it will be there when we need it.

That can be difficult in some circumstances, though, so I’ll describe how to do this with just a global variable and some preamble code…and we’ll drop the page header at the end of each page, and at the end of the job. This method is also adaptable to using multiple logos in a single print run.

Making Your Global Variable

There are two common ways to create a global variable while your form is running.

The first is to use a command like this in your FNF data:

Or you can do this, which does the same thing:

The second is to put your data into a field that has its Global attribute set:

If you double-click on your field, you can see the button to switch on the Global option here:

Field Options in Output Designer

The trick if you use the field method is that the field must be hit before you need the variable to place the changing section.

Creating Your Changing Subforms

You will need to create a subform for each and every possible code that you will encounter. I also recommend making one that will appear when your chosen code is empty. It will happen, and its best to print the “default” logo and/or address than to print nothing or – worse – throw an error.

For our sample, you would create four subforms with these names:

To maintain your sanity, make all of these occupy the same amount of space on the page. So, if P2 has the biggest logo and/or the longest address, make all your subforms that size and allow for that much space to be used at the top of your pages.

I find it useful to draw a box on my boilerplate (JFMAIN) page that takes up the required space. Just set it to no fill and invisible outline and you’ve got a nice dotted-line box that will not print. You can then create each heading right there and then copy/paste them to other pages to make subforms of them.

Calling Your Logos

I’ve made the decision here to demonstrate how to call the header at the end of each page. That makes this easier, but it has its limits. My hope is that if you need to do this another way you’ll be well enough equipped to try it.

If you have managed to get your Key into a global variable and you’ve got a newer-style form that has a SWITCHPAGE event in the JFPREAMBLE_1 docvar, then you can override that event with another one that will drop your logo and then switch the page.

A standard SWITCHPAGE looks like this:

And we’ll copy that across to the override section of our JFPREAMBLE and edit it to look like this:

positionabsolute
This inline text text control command tells JFMerge to place the “pen” where it will place the next thing it does at a specific point on the page. You can get this measurement by getting to coordinates of that invisible box you drew, or you can put a field there and use positionsave and positionrestore to get the same effect. If you were going to put this together as a set of standard paste-in functions for a number of forms, you might go with that instead.

@global:
This construct definitively calls for a global variable of a specific name. In our case, that’s PLANTCODE. You could use @PLANTCODE. and get the same effect, but I feel the inclusion of the word “global” eliminates any possible ambiguity. It’s a style thing.

A note about my syntax: You will notice that in my preamble code I always type the names of variables and field names (things I have decided) in UPPERCASE, and all reserved words, commands and so forth are all in lowercase. I do this from habit, but you cannot argue that it doesn’t make a tough preamble easier to read.

What About the Last Page?

You may well ask what happens on your last page, when there is no page being switched to, there will be no SWITCHPAGE fired and therefore there will be no logo. Add an event like this to your JFPREAMBLE:

The JfEndData!EndData group will only ever fire once for every data file that you process. It will be the last thing that JFMerge will fire when your data file comes to an end. For our purposes, this is perfect.

Samples

Of course there are samples! I’ve created a data file and a couple of forms in Output Designer 5.6 that demonstrate these concepts, and that should actually work. Now that you’ve read the article (you did read it, didn’t you?) you can download the samples. I’ve put some comments in them to help you along. There are two data files that show how a single logo selection works as well as how you can change the logo even as you move through the data file.

Click here to download the samples that go with this article.

More Complex Exercises

It is possible to use more than one key to determine which logo or address you should print. You could use a combination of a plant code and a country code, for example, and end up with subform names like this:

What you really need to remember if you decide to do this is that your number of combinations can quickly spiral out of control. If you had ten plants in 3 countries, that’s 30 combinations right there. Then you’d need to create LOGO__US, LOGO__CA, LOGO__MX, LOGO_P2_, LOGO_P1_ and so on and so on to allow for possible empties.

In such a case as this, I’d recommend trying to come up with something else to use as the Key. Really, I would.

If you must do something like this and you can keep your 2 keys separate (say you have a code for the address and another code for the logo), then you just create subforms for logos and subforms for addresses, and use them both. Not too hard that way.

As with all things JetForm, there are probably more than a dozen perfectly good ways to do this. This is just one of them.