How to print labels at home

Printing on paper is forgiving. If the page lands a sixteenth of an inch off, nobody notices and nobody cares. A label sheet removes that tolerance entirely: the same drift moves the top line of every address onto the gap above it, and you find out after thirty labels have already gone through.

The good news is that printer error is boringly consistent. A printer that lands a thirty-second of an inch high does it every time, on every sheet, for years. So this is a problem you solve once per printer rather than once per sheet — and the whole procedure below is really just a way of measuring your particular machine and then telling the template about it.

The six steps

1. 1
   Set the scale to 100%

   In the print dialog, find the scaling option and set it to 100% or “Actual size”. Do not leave it on “Fit to page”, “Shrink oversized pages”, or “Scale to fit” — all three shrink the sheet by a few percent so nothing is clipped, which pulls every label inward from the edges. This single setting causes more ruined label sheets than everything else combined.
2. 2
   Turn off any borderless or poster mode

   Borderless printing stretches the page slightly in the other direction. If your printer offers it, make sure it is off for label stock.
3. 3
   Print one proof on plain paper

   Generate the sheet with “Outline each label” switched on and print a single copy on ordinary paper. This costs you one sheet of paper and about twenty seconds, and it is the only way to find out what your printer actually does rather than what it claims to do.
4. 4
   Hold the proof against a real sheet

   Put an unused label sheet behind the proof and hold both up to a window. Check the four corners rather than the centre — drift is always most obvious at the edges. Every printed box should sit inside a real label with an even margin all round.
5. 5
   Nudge, then re-proof

   If the proof sits high, low, or to one side, use the alignment nudge on any of our label makers to shift the whole grid in 1/32-inch steps in the opposite direction, and print another proof. Two rounds is usually enough. Once it lines up, that setting will hold for every sheet that printer produces.
6. 6
   Feed one sheet at a time

   Load a single label sheet rather than a stack, and use the rear or manual-feed tray if your printer has one — the straighter the paper path, the less the sheet skews on its way through. If your printer curls label stock, that path usually fixes it too.

People skip the plain-paper proof because it feels like an extra step. It is worth being blunt about the trade: the proof costs one sheet of paper and about twenty seconds. Skipping it costs a sheet of label stock, the time you spent typing the addresses, and usually a second trip to the shop, because nobody buys a spare box of labels. Do the proof the first time you use a printer with labels. After that, trust the nudge setting you found.