Re: Cheque Printing, JLanno, February 19, 2007 02:37PM, “have to print cheques one at a time because with each successive cheque printed in a series the alignment changes”.
This can happen, but I have never seen it to be a problem to solve.
First: Are they using a laser or dot-matrix printer?
Assuming it is a laser then the solution has alway’s been to:
– Make sure the end of the template looks like this:
@ENDITEMS (it there is a stub at the bottom)
@FF
@ENDPAGE
– PARSE the template and make sure that at the end of the PARSE the result reports “Form length:” as 59 or less with (+ form feed) after it.
Why? Most laster printers, at 6 lines per inch, have a maximum page length of 60 lines (This will vary sometimes, but not by much.) If the PARSE result is 59 lines plus a form-feed then the cheque output will fit on the printed page, and the form-feed ensures that the cheque form will be ejected and a snew one started at that point. In 20 years I have never seen this fail – but you sometimes have to experiment with the total number of lines.
Now, on a dot-matrix printer, you are in a different world. Her a cheque form is normally 7.5″. Take 7.5 and multiply it by 6 lines/inch and you get 42 lines. Now your cheque template should PARSE to *exactly* 42 lines, and you must *not* put an @FF at the bottom (which ejects an 11 inch page – not a 7.5 inch one.) Now, if you find the cheque ‘creeping’ up or down from one cheque to the next it’s because the printer is not printing at a proper 6 lines per inch. If that’s the case then report the printer make/model and someone can research the proper Esc codes to set it to that line spacing.
The bottom line is that I have never run across a printing problem like the one you describe that cannot be fixed very easily. The only exceptions were odd-ball printers that could not print at six lines per inch no matter what you did – and that was certainly not NV’s fault.
If none of the above solves the problem, then please report back with the exact printer make & model.
Bob Halpin
halpin@softrite.ca
