What the label will really print

August 24, 2026

Three things about labels you design yourself, all of them about the gap between what a screen showed and what came out of the printer.

Open a line to read the whole story behind it.

• Improved A design is only used on the roll it was drawn for, and the app now says so before anything prints.

  A design is only used on the roll it was drawn for, and the app now says so when that is not the roll you print on. Marking a design as the one to use while your label printing was set to another size meant labels quietly came out in the standard layout — at a size you never chose, on paper you had loaded for the design — and the test print inside the designer looked right the whole time, because that one always uses the design’s own roll. The list of designs now says when a design will not be reached and which roll your printing is set to, and the print page says the same before anything reaches the printer. What prints is unchanged: which roll is in the machine is yours to say, and a design drawn for one size cannot be printed at another.

• Fixed Turning something on a label now uses the whole box you drew it in, at every angle.

  Turning something on a label you design now uses the whole box you drew it in. Turn a piece of text a quarter turn and it gets the side it will actually read along — draw a tall narrow box for words that run up a shelf label, and the words have the height to fit in. They were being laid out across the narrow side first and turned afterwards, so they had already been shrunk to nothing by the time they stood up, and the finished text hung out over the edges of the box. What you draw is now what lands on the paper at every angle, which is also what the picture beside the editor was already showing you. Two smaller things follow: turning a plain rectangle or a rule does nothing any more, because a shape with no reading direction is the same shape turned; and a rule that runs up the label is one you draw with no width and a height, rather than a flat one turned on its end.

• Fixed The preview now shows the code the printed label actually carries, instead of a stand-in.

  The preview of a label you design now shows the code the printed label actually carries. It was drawing a stand-in instead — a made-up number in the shape the app falls back to when a thing has no code of its own — so the QR code and the barcode in the picture were not the ones a scanner reads off the paper. A product label carries its part number, a place carries the code on the shelf, and an individually numbered item carries its own; none of the three matched what the picture showed. The test print beside the preview always printed the real thing, so the two pictures on one screen disagreed with each other. They agree now, and the stand-in the preview draws against carries a code shaped like a real one.