A cheque layout is a map: it tells ChequeMaster where on the paper the date goes, where the payee line sits, how wide the amount-in-words field is. Most banks are already mapped, so you only need this if your bank is missing, if your cheque book has an unusual design, or if a bank has redesigned its stationery.

The layout editor works against a picture of your actual cheque, which is what makes it reliable — you are positioning fields on top of the real thing rather than guessing at millimetres.

Start with a good scan

Everything downstream depends on this, so it is worth doing properly:

  • Scan a blank, unused cheque — never a completed one.
  • Lay it square against the edge of the scanner glass. A crooked scan produces a crooked layout, and the tilt is hard to spot until cheques come out wrong.
  • 200–300 DPI is plenty. Higher just makes a bigger file.
  • Scan the whole cheque, edge to edge, without cropping into it.

Build the layout

  1. Open Cheque Layout from the left navigation and add a new layout.
  2. Give it a name you will recognise in a dropdown — the bank plus the account type works well.
  3. Enter the cheque's width and height in millimetres. Measure the paper with a ruler; do not estimate. This is the single most common source of misaligned output.
  4. Import your scan as the background image.
  5. Drag each field onto the place it should print — date, payee, amount in words, amount in figures, and any others your cheque uses.
  6. Set the font and size per field so the text fits the space your cheque allows.
  7. Save.

Fields you can place

Not every cheque uses every field, and you switch off the ones yours does not need:

  • Date — either one continuous field, or separate boxes per digit. Cheques in India, Bahrain, Pakistan and Singapore typically use boxed digits; most Gulf cheques use a single date field.
  • Payee — one or two lines, depending on how much room the cheque gives you.
  • Amount in words — usually two lines. Long amounts wrap onto the second automatically, so enable it even if short amounts fit on one.
  • Amount in figures — the boxed figure, normally at the right.
  • A/C payee crossing — corner lines on an Indian cheque, a vertical band on many Gulf cheques.
  • Bearer and Not above — where your cheque prints them.

Test before you trust it

Print onto plain A4 and hold it against a real cheque up to a window or a lamp. Compare every field, not just the obvious ones.

Then read what you see carefully, because the fix differs:

  • Everything shifted the same way — the layout is right and the printer is feeding slightly off. Adjust the top and left margins in Settings. Do not touch the layout.
  • Fields wrong relative to each other — the layout needs work. Recheck your width and height first, since a wrong overall size stretches every position.

Confusing those two is the reason people spend an afternoon on something that was a two-millimetre margin change. More on this in fixing cheque printing alignment.

Reusing a layout

One layout serves every cheque book on that cheque design. Create it once for your HDFC current account and every future HDFC book of the same design can use it. Where a bank issues visibly different stationery for different account tiers, those need separate layouts — that is why ChequeMaster carries both HDFC and HDFC Preferred, and both Union Bank and Union Bank Gold.