Checks print incorrectly aligned how to adjust check forms?

AI generated answer (using internal Slack threads):

If your checks are printing incorrectly aligned, you can adjust the check forms in NetSuite by customizing the form layout. Here are the steps to do so: 1. Navigate to Customization > Forms > Transaction Forms. 2. Find the check form you are using and click Edit. 3. In the Printing subtab, you can adjust the alignment of the check form. You can also adjust the margins if necessary. 4. Click Save. Please note that if you are using Advanced PDF/HTML templates, you will need to customize the template itself to adjust the alignment. You can do this by going to Customization > Forms > Advanced PDF/HTML Templates, find the template you are using, and click Edit. From there, you can adjust the alignment in the template's code. Also, it's important to note that if you are using a custom check form, you need to ensure that the form is set to use Advanced PDF/HTML templates. If it's set to use Basic templates, it will print in the basic check format regardless of the template you've customized. Lastly, if you are experiencing issues with the physical printing of the checks (e.g., checks printing upside down), this is likely due to printer settings or the way the check stock is fed into the printer, and not a NetSuite issue. ****** Disclaimer: This response was generated by an artificial intelligence assistant based on previous conversations from multiple Slack channels, and may contain inaccuracies or mistakes. ******

What do you mean by "incorrectly aligned"? Does the signature or MICR numbers show in the wrong place, making them unable to be read by machines? Something else?

We have preprinted checks, that I had aligned the advancedPDF template and it was fine. Ive checked the old checks vs new ones that came in and physically their identical but when printing it prints everything too high from the lines or boxes so things are vertically misaligned Ive looked at the user preferences for printing alignment and margins and even adjusted the advanced PDF but it still prints incorrectly. and yes ive validated the form im making the change is correct. I left myself a tag in the text and to be 100% sure that is the form.

It could be a lot of things, and this makes me wish Advanced PDF Templates had some kind of logs to show what was changed. However, it could be that it's not the template but rather the data that's being displayed that caused the change. We had an issue with vertical alignment last year caused by text contents that were too long for the table cell they were inside of. The problem went away when I truncated the text using a freemarker substring helper. This was okay to use in this case because the offending part of the printout was non-essential in line Item descriptions/memos. A similar thing could occur with images such as logos that were changed, if they're in the body instead of the header (since the header has its size set to a static value). To fix this kind of thing where I can't figure out what changed, I make sure Sandbox is up to date, back up the template code from Production, then in SANDBOX, start deleting half of the code and rebalancing the tags, saving, doing a test print, then seeing if the problem went away. If it's still there I delete half of the code that's left, rebalance the tags, save, and do another test print, and so on, until the problem goes away. Then I know the problem was somewhere in the last block of code I deleted, and I restore from backup and start narrowing down from there. If you get to where it's barely enough code to let it print at all and there's almost no content, and the problem is still occurring, then it might not be the template code after all. You could do a quick check to see if that's the case before doing that binary elimination method I mentioned, by starting from the barebones workable version and then restoring half the code per each test.

Thank you, you make a great point. I will start looking at the data as well before making changes. Luckily I just refreshed sandbox, will get to some data and template comparison.

On that check printing template we also had to really tightly control not only the vertical size of every element but also tell it to print no more than x number of them so it wouldn't push things off to a next page. We needed everything to fit on one page, so if it exceeded x line items then we cut it off and told it to leave a note saying the rest of the info can be requested, and then print the rest of the lines as blank spaces. I recently found a way to get around having to pad it and still get the MICR and signature lines to land in the right places but it's not quite as stable as the old tight-fisted approach.

@Arthur Bagumyan On another note you can see the version number of template in the bottom left and you can add &version= and a number in the url to go back to another, earlier version. You could then copy elsewhere to compare.

I didn't know about that feature. That's very cool! And that would probably be a much faster way to find out if something changed in the template (not the content/data) to make the layout misaligned.