Software for your Label Printer – Zebra, Brother, Dymo & Co.
Modern label printers usually come with a Windows driver and can therefore be used with most software. However, to
print labels with barcodes, especially on label printers, the use of specialized software is highly recommended.
Although popular label printers from manufacturers such as Zebra, Brother, Dymo and others are capable of printing sharp barcodes, software not optimized for label printing can result in blurred or distorted barcodes. As label printers generally have a relatively low resolution of 203 or 300 dpi, this must be taken into account by the label printing software.
Examining Label Printers
To illustrate this, let's take a closer look at the printing process. The label printer sees a label to be printed as a coarse grid of horizontal and vertical dots:
The printer can either print each dot completely or leave it completely unprinted. Partial printing of a
dot, such as printing only a quarter of the dot while leaving the remaining three-quarters blank or in a different
color, is technically impossible.
Because of this limitation, a barcode line whose width is normally, for example, 2.7 times the dot size of the label printer, will inevitably be enlarged to 3 dots or reduced to 2 dots when printed:
The image illustrates the problem: where there were originally two lines of equal width, they appear on the label with
different widths. This results in distorted proportions and affects the readability of the barcode for a scanner.
Impact on Barcode Quality
This effect can vary in severity, from reduced barcode quality and the need for repeated scanning attempts, to complete unreadability of the barcode. In general, the lower the resolution and the smaller the barcode, the greater the negative impact. However, even with higher resolution and larger barcodes, the quality is generally inferior to what would be possible with the same label printer.Solution: Specialized Software
Our specialized label-printing software precisely adjusts barcodes to the resolution of the label printer. The software adjusts the width of all bars and spaces in a barcode before printing, while maintaining the proportions, so that they correspond to whole multiples of the respective dot size:
This eliminates any rounding up or down during printing, so that all the proportions in the barcode are maintained. Once
this has been done, the resolution of the printer has no effect on the quality of the barcode. It must be accepted that,
as part of this adjustment, the overall width of the barcode on the printout will naturally increase or decrease
slightly. This is an unavoidable side effect.