Check prints too small (Q Mac)

emdruy

I just installed V. 6.2.1 on my Mac M1 Mini running Big Sur. When I go to print a check from the register, the preview looks fine but the resulting check has a tiny font printing in the upper left portion of the check, which is virtually unreadable. This has never happened before. Printing on a Brother HL-5470DW

UKR

Have you selected the correct Check Style (Standard, Wallet ..., Voucher)?
Have you checked Printer Properties to select printing on 8.5*11 standard paper, 100% magnification, no auto-detect paper size, no photo printing?

jacobs

It sounds like a macOS/print driver issue to me. Are you sure you have the latest driver for your printer, and that it's stated to be compatible with Big Sur? I just did a quick search for this printer, and it seems to only have drivers through macOS Catalina. In many cases, a Catalina-compatible driver will work fine on Big Sur, but in some cases it may not. You may need to do more searching or check with Brother about this.

Next, what happens if when you go to print, you select to open in Print Preview (or save as a PDF) instead. Is the resulting preview/PDF the tiny version or the proper version? As a temporary workaround, if you save to a PDF or Print Preview, can you then print from Preview to the printer and have it come out correctly? 

emdruy

The drivers are correct as everything else prints properly. When I go to print a check, the default letter size is "Quicken". I don't think I've ever seen that before. Even when I modify it to print out as a standard letter size, the resulting print remains tiny in the upper left quadrant of the paper.

emdruy

> @UKR said:
> Have you selected the correct Check Style (Standard, Wallet ..., Voucher)?
> Have you checked Printer Properties to select printing on 8.5*11 standard paper, 100% magnification, no auto-detect paper size, no photo printing?

Correct Check style is selected. Printer properties default to "Quicken"which I've never seen before, and there is no way to change it to standard paper. I"ve been printing checks from Quicken for more than 10 years, and I've never seen this behavior before.

jacobs

You said you just installed Quicken version 6.2.1 on Big Sur. What version of Quicken were you using before upgrading to 6.2.1? Did you just move to this Mac, or have you been using it successfully with Quicken for awhile? Have you installed any macOS upgrade to Big Sur recently? Just trying to see what changed.

I don’t think there were any changes to the Quicken code for check printing in 6.2.0 or 6.2.1. This still sounds like a printer driver issue to me, as almost all the functionality of the print dialog box comes from the operating system, not Quicken. The default letter size of Quicken also sounds like a problem with the print driver. And I haven’t seen any other reports of such a printing problem from other users, which also points towards the likelihood of this being unique to this print driver.

jacobs

Hmm, another question: where do you see Paper Size in the Print Checks dialog box. For me, the basic dialog box shows this:

I have four printers installed on my Mac, and trying each of them, when pulling down the menu where it shows Quicken, I see some combination of options for Layout, Color Matching, Paper Handling, Paper Feed, Cover Page, and Printer Features -- but no selection for Paper Size (as I do when printing any report from Quicken).

emdruy

> @jacobs said:
> You said you just installed Quicken version 6.2.1 on Big Sur. What version of Quicken were you using before upgrading to 6.2.1? Did you just move to this Mac, or have you been using it successfully with Quicken for awhile? Have you installed any macOS upgrade to Big Sur recently? Just trying to see what changed.
>
> I don’t think there were any changes to the Quicken code for check printing in 6.2.0 or 6.2.1. This still sounds like a printer driver issue to me, as almost all the functionality of the print dialog box comes from the operating system, not Quicken. The default letter size of Quicken also sounds like a problem with the print driver. And I haven’t seen any other reports of such a printing problem from other users, which also points towards the likelihood of this being unique to this print driver.

> @jacobs said:
> Hmm, another question: where do you see Paper Size in the Print Checks dialog box. For me, the basic dialog box shows this:
>
>
> I have four printers installed on my Mac, and trying each of them, when pulling down the menu where it shows Quicken, I see some combination of options for Layout, Color Matching, Paper Handling, Paper Feed, Cover Page, and Printer Features -- but no selection for Paper Size (as I do when printing any report from Quicken).

FWIW>>, I re-installed printer driver firmware, and the last driver for this printer, which is several years old. I reset the printer to factory settings and now it prints correctly. What is interesting is that before I did all this, any other PDF printed correctly. When I converted the Quicken check to a PDF and tried to print from Preview, it still showed the aberrant behavior, making me think that something was embedded in the Quicken code. Only Quicken checks, when printed as a PDF was anomalous, everything else, including PDF and Word documents printed correctly. Thanks for your help and comments. I think everything is working correctly now. To answer your other questions, I"ve been printing checks on Quicken for >10 years, on multiple Macs and printers. I'm now using a Mac M1 Mini, which is the only thing in my workflow that is different. It is possible that the Mini is the culprit if it didn't recognize the previously installed driver. Reinstalling and resetting the printer did the trick.

jacobs

Glad to hear that you got it fixed by resetting the printer and reinstalling its software, and that the print driver works correctly even though it's a little old.

It just didn't seem like something Quicken was doing. (Using Print Preview or generating a PDF still relies on macOS for the printing functionality.) Having managed an office full of Macs, I've seen cases in the past (unrelated to Quicken) where a print driver not updated for the latest macOS works correctly for 99% of things, but does something goofy or fails in just a few cases.

emdruy

> @jacobs said:
> Glad to hear that you got it fixed by resetting the printer and reinstalling its software, and that the print driver works correctly even though it's a little old.
>
> It just didn't seem like something Quicken was doing. (Using Print Preview or generating a PDF still relies on macOS for the printing functionality.) Having managed an office full of Macs, I've seen cases in the past (unrelated to Quicken) where a print driver not updated for the latest macOS works correctly for 99% of things, but does something goofy or fails in just a few cases.

The weirdest part was being able to print any non-Quicken PDF correctly except for a PDF generated by the Quicken software. It is hard for me to reconcile that without thinking of something embedded in the Quicken software, or incompatibility between the way the M1 Mini Mac failed to interpret the driver software and the Quicken software. Maybe reinstalling the driver and letting Rosetta interpolate it for the M1 chip was what was needed.