Fargo Card Printer/Mag Stripes

[Walker Art Center]

We have recently installed FMP6 on a Windows XP desktop to print magnet striped cards to a Fargo DTC525 printer.

The printer setup is fine, and the layouts look great. The problem is the mag stripe.

To encode the data, the printer needs ASCII characters with specified leads and endings. Piece of cake, I made calc fields to create that text for each record. Getting the printer to encode them properly, however, has eluded me.

I can print just text to the cards and it looks great. But when I add my calculated text strings to the layout, I lose the printed text and fail to encode the cards properly. When the encoder puts data on the tracks and I run them through a scanner, it shows some of the text, and a lot of crap.

I should note than I'm printing on the C80 card stock provided by Fargo, so card stock should not be an issue. Is this a driver problem? Is there a setting or plug in for FMP that I need? The rest of our office is on Mac OS9 and X, so some of the vagaries of the Windows environment are still new to us.

We are three weeks away from opening a colossal expansion, and these magentic cards are Phase I of a big database consolidation project. Any help would be appreciated, and if you're in the Minneapolis area, I will gladly give you two tickets to our grand opening if you help me find a solution.

Thanks!

-Aaron Szopinski

[stanley]

Aaron:

I've never done mag stripe encoding - my department is barcodes, but some issues may be the same. So, a few questions:

Can you encode the cards with whatever software came with the printer? Hopefully you can, as then we would know that the problem is in FMP, and not the driver or the printer.

Are you sure you're getting the right ASCII characters to come out of FMP? You may want to try a test where you manually enter the correct ASCII into a field & have that put onto the mag stripe. The reason I ask is that you say you get "some of the text, and then a lot of crap."

For the moment I'd ignore your text on the cards and concentrate on the mag stripe. However, you could expand your test to include text as well. You should be able to do both at the same time, but as I don't know much about the Fargo printer, I can't comment further.

Good luck

-Stanley