Table of Contents

Label printers

Label printers are a different kind of animal. They can have problems that you would not find with ordinary printers. Therefore, we will try to give some hints on making them print the necessary labels.

Paper size

One of the most common issues with label printers is that they ignore jobs with the wrong paper size. The printer will have an idea of the loaded labels' size and then insist on having print jobs of that size. The printer may reject the job even if that height or width is off by a fraction of a millimeter.

We recommend setting the exact measurement for the paper size in your layout and the direct printer definition. You must use the same unit of measure as the printer driver.

Paper size

State

Most printers return to the same state after printing. The consequence of this behavior is that you will get the same result if you send two identical print jobs to the same printer.

We have seen printers that remember the state after the previous print job. This has been observed for Zebra label printers, but this is probably not exclusive to these printers.

When you have printers that remember state, you can find yourself in a situation where two identical printers behave differently, even if they are the same make and model. To get out of a situation like this, you can reset your printers to factory default settings and set them up the same way.

Driver types

Printer drivers can come in different flavors. Drivers for Intermec printers are a fine example. When you find the driver for your model printer, you must choose from a list of DP, IPL, DSim, ESim, and ZSim. The DP driver is for regular Windows printing. DP drivers are the right driver if you have used the ForNAV designer or have a label with a Word or RDLC layout. IPL drivers are for Intermec Printer Language, the native format. The Sim will simulate other printer languages, such as Zebra.

If you do not have the right driver, the printer can stop printing or discard jobs in the printer spooler queue on Windows.