The first of the month is a day fraught with emotion, and writer's cramp--the rent, the electric bill, the phone bill (and my handwriting is, well, nothing to write home about). I wrote Check It Out to ease the burden. It lets you type in the payee, date, account number, digital amount and written amount, and then prints it onto your wallet-sized checks; all you need to do is sign them. Check It Out works on either the C-64 or the C-128 and with almost any printer.
Check It Out guides you around the check, prompting you to enter the information to be printed. A review screen lets you catch and correct any errors. Before printing, place the check flush with the left edge of the printer and the top of the check level with the print head. Be prepared to make mistakes on the first run. You might want to photocopy or trace some blank checks to practice on; after a few tries, you'll know exactly how to load the check.
If you find there is too much or too little space between the lines or items, refer to "Customizing Check It Out" below for tips on how to make it work on your printer. Now, if I could only get it to pay with someone else's money.
Customizing Check It Out
Check It Out is a simple Basic program, so you can easily modify it to work on almost any printer. I wrote the program to work on the MPS 802 printer. If you have an MPS 803, copy the program to a work disk and replace lines 40, 730 and 780 in Listing 1 with the following:
If you have any other type of printer, and are having difficulties getting the entries to print in the correct place, first try adjusting the placement of the check. If you can't fix the problem that way, and you have a little Basic programming skill, then you have a few options. If you're getting too much space between the printed lines, examine line 760. The command PRINT#3: prints out a blank line. To reduce the amount of space between the items on the check, you will have to remove the PRINT#3: command in the appropriate place. Try replacing line 760 in Listing 1 with:
If items on the check are printing too far to the right or left, modify the number of spaces across by increasing or decreasing the number of spaces in lines 30, 40 and 50. Experiment until you get the lines the right length.
