Avoiding misaligned label printouts

Introduction

Most printers are unnable to print on areas close to the edge of the paper, the need a paper handling margin of typically 3 to 15 millimeters.

When printing PDF files, both PDF viewers and renderers (like in drivers, CUPS filters or printer engines) tend to shrink page content to avoid drawing content in the margin area, which could lead to content not beeing printed.

When printing labels, this behaviour results in painfully misaligned output.

We tried to optimize the barcode printing PDFs generated by MDA by optimizing the library (see https://jira.clazzes.org/browse/PDFSKETCH-27), but it seems impossible to satisfy all software and hardware out there.

Hints

Therefore we collected some hints here:

• Always use a PDF viewer allowing to print without any automagical scaling or moving
  
  • Acrobat Reader (main print dialog) or Evince (on the "Page Handling" tab of the print dialog): Set "Page Scaling" to "None" and uncheck "Auto Rotate and Center"
• Before turning expensive labels into waste-paper, test it:
  
  • print a single page of barcodes on an equally sized sheet white paper (preferably use a thin paper)
  • on this sheet, stack an empty sheet of your label paper, aligned of course
  • hold this against bright light or window and check the positioning of printed content