If you have one of the newer HP LaserJet printers, one thing you’ll notice is the TrueType MICR fonts can appear faint or have a thinner stroke than they should. This is not a toner problem, as as the image quality and density is fine, but rather a result in the way the newer printers render the font itself. If the MICR font doesn’t have the proper stroke width the signal strength of the characters will decrease. Low signal strength may cause your bank’s check scanners to reject them. This will result in your bank in having to manually encode each check. If this happens your bank will likely contact you about the problem. But you’ll need to get the problem fixed or the bank may assess an additional processing charge.
Document Testing is the Key – There are a couple of ways to fix this problem. But whatever you do, you really should have your checks analyzed to make sure the documents are good. If you buy from us, we offer this as a free service, as we want to make sure all of our customers are producing good MICR documents. So if you are unsure about your documents, just send us some voided documents and we’ll analyze them and call you back the day we receive them at no charge.
Increase Print Density – The easiest way to fix this problem is to adjust the print density of your laser printer. To do this, you’ll need to open the properties of your printer (start->Printers->right-click (your printer)->select properties), then select the
Device Settings tab. Set the print density to 5 (the darkest) and you should be fine.
Click here for a screen shot
Replace MICR Font with a Bolder One – The second way is to replace the font with a bolder MICR font. If you are using the Advangtage TrueType MICR font and have the ability, you can just bold it. In our test the bold version works perfectly on these printers. If you don’t have the ability to bold the font, another alternative is to replace the font with a bolder TrueType MICR Font. We only offer one version of our font, but if you need more flexibility here, try the
ID Automation MICR font. It comes with 5 different boldnesses and 5 different widths, a total of 25 MICR font variations.
Click here for the ID Automation MICR Font
So far we’ve observed these issues with the HP LaserJet P1005, P1006, P1505 laser printers. No matter what you do, be sure to send us a voided check so we can analyze it.
Tags: density settings, micr toner, p1005, p1006
April 22, 2010