It seems that every quarter, the [evolution-talk] lists light up with bureaus having problems printing Federal forms 941 (and others) where stuff comes out garbled, and naturally want to fix it.
Commonly, people will point to the Evolution help that recommends:
Specific fonts must be installed on the local workstation to print or view tax returns properly, ... 6 Download and install the following files to the local workstation. Each file must be downloaded and installed separately. 3of9.TTF Ocraext.TTF
Unfortunately, this advice often substitutes Just Trying Things™ for getting to the root cause, and is at best a waste of time.
Remember: fonts are executable code, so do not install them unless you are pretty sure they are necessary, rather than just taking a wild guess.
Let's look at these two fonts recommended:
- 3of9
- This is the Code 39 font that's used to make a barcode, and the example from Wikipedia looks like:
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- Evolution uses barcodes in several places, including VMR packout sheets and probably in some tax forms, but this is not a common font used with the 941.
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Simple rules:
- If the page has a good barcode, do not install this font.
- If the page is not supposed to have a barcode, do not install this font
- If the page is suppose to have a barcode but it's garbled, install this font.
- Ocraext
- OCR-A is an Optical Character Reader (OCR) font designed to be easily read by computer rather than humans, and the example from Wikipedia shows the alphabet looking like:
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OCR-A font example - I don't know which forms use these, but in almost every case of garbled Forms 941, this has not been the problem because the garbled part was not OCR-A.
- Note that OCR-A is not the same as MICR that appears at the bottom of checks even though there's a clear family resemblance:
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MICR is not OCR-A! -
Looking on the IRS Website, it appears that OCR-A is used in the upper right of the form:
- If this control number appears correct on your 941, do not install this font because you don't need it.
It's very rare that either of these fonts is implicated in a form printing badly, so installing them will do nothing but waste time and delay getting to the bottom of the issue.
In practice, this is almost always due to print driver issues: specifically, the use of a PCL 6 driver on an older printer that does a much better job with PCL 5. Try changing the driver for the printer and see if that makes any difference.
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