Online Labels Forum

TLDR: By adding vertical lines to your design it can potentially help label alignment because the printer feeds at a more consistent rate.

You've read the printer alignment guide. It's not an offset issue. It's not a scaling issue. You understand the software and printer settings. Yet you still can't get the ink to land on the correct spot on the page. Specifically, this is for when the page looks pretty good at the top but the further down the page you look, the worse the alignment gets. In my case, I had 0.75 inch circular labels with borders. That's a very hard layout to get lined up because of the size, shape, and border. I spent months trying to fix the issue including buying three different printers, the last of which was $800.

In my last attempt to get things working I was brainstorming how to get the printer to print slower and at a consistent speed. My theory is that when the printer feeder is speeding up and slowing down because there is blank (white) space, the feeder is slipping just the tiniest bit. By the time the printer is printing the last rows, the error is noticeable.

So the solution is to put vertical lines on the page to put the printer in "cruise control". I used two 1 pt black lines stretching down the page, one on the left and one on the right, to cause the printer to pace itself. I'm still working on the technique. I will edit with more information as I learn more. The important thing is to ensure there are no rows or horizontal sections that don't require the print head / cartridge to move over and put down ink.

Here is the current template I'm using for testing alignment and printer settings. When I added the rectangle around the labels, the alignment improved. In your design, you could try adding a vertical line on the far left and right sides of the page. You could try 1, 2, 3, or more lines to see if it makes a difference. You can try printing yellow lines if you want it to be less noticeable if you are selling the whole sheet to someone.

[img=http://svgur.com/s/e7F]Label template with added markup to diagnose printer alignment issues[/img]
SVG link: http://svgur.com/s/e7F