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.

JetForm/Accelio/Adobe Central is as fast to print as it is because it does not send a completed and rendered raster to the printer. All that the printer gets is, in the case of HP’s, PCL. It uses the smarts built into the printer itself to RIP the code to pixels for printing. As a result, the files sent down the line are much, much smaller than any spool you’ll ever see come from a Windows (for example) application.

RIP – Raster Image Processing or Raster Image Processor. This is the hardware or software responsible for taking the printing commands – things like lines, boxes and text – and turning them into pixels (a raster image) suitable for printing to paper. Every single laser and inkjet printer in the World uses a RIP of one type or another, and the best and fastest RIPs are almost always in hardware.

Raster – A bitmap image, meaning one that is made of pixels.

HP-PCL – Hewlett-Packard Printer Control Language. This is HP’s own Page Description Language intended to be used with laser printers. Though not as accurate or quite as flexible as Adobe Postscript, PCL is an excellent language which contains everything needed for business and other utility printing. One strong difference from Postscript is that PCL is a binary language as is very compact, while Postscript is actually a language and intended to be human-readable.

Smaller files means faster transit, and faster transit means faster first-page-out. The RIP in the printer is also highly-tuned to this task, so even on a relatively poor network connection we can keep printing at full speed.

The problem with these cheaper printers is that they don’t have any of these smarts built into them. They rely on the host computer doing the printing to RIP the printer data to a raster that is then sent to what is essentially just the print engine.

HP calls this “Host-based” printing. Check out the 1022n spec and see how many times it says that.

Printers like this are, generally, a bad idea anyway. They can’t be used cross-platform, and when the next OS comes out and driver support goes away…you’ve got nothing. I had a Canon laser once that worked like this, and when Windows XP came along, it suddenly became useless to me.

To get around this, you’ll have to configure your form(s) to be able to print with the HP Windows Driver. You do that from the “Presentment Targets” menu, and I don’t advise it. Primarily because then everything slows down, and you don’t want that.

If you have a fleet of these printers, you will no doubt have to bite the bullet and switch to the Windows driver. If you only have one to test, I’m sorry to say you won’t want to be saving this money…buy higher models that have the built-in RIPs.