Label Sheet Maker

Picking the layout

The five presets are the label geometries you will actually find on a shelf in the US, described by what they measure rather than by a part number, since the same layout is sold by half a dozen brands. 30-up address labels are 2.625 by 1 inch, three across and ten down, and they are what goes on an envelope or a file folder. 10-up shipping labels are 4 by 2 inches, two across and five down. 80-up are 1.75 by 0.5 inches, four across and twenty down, and are for numbering, dating and marking small parts — half an inch of height is one line of type and nothing more.

The even grid option ignores all of that and simply divides the page into the rows and columns you ask for, with a margin and a gap you set. That is the one for plain paper you are going to cut, for card stock name tags, and for freezer or pantry labels where nothing has to line up with pre-cut stock. Turn cut lines on for that, and off for real label stock where a printed border around a die-cut label just looks like a mistake.

Getting text into the labels

One line of input is one label, filling left to right and then down. To break a line inside a label, put // where the break goes: 1200 Industrial Pkwy//Suite 4//Toledo, OH 43607 comes out as a three-line address. Text that is too wide wraps on its own, but it wraps wherever it happens to fit, which is why splitting an address yourself reads better than letting it fold.

The prefix box adds the same words in front of every label, which saves typing a box number or a department name on each line. The copies field makes N of every line — useful when you need a dozen of the same return address — and "repeat the list to fill the last sheet" cycles back through the list to use the leftover positions rather than wasting them. The result panel tells you how many are empty on the last sheet before you print.

Type size against label size

The tool reports the label size in both inches and millimetres and warns when the longest line will not fit, using a rough estimate of about 0.55 em per character. Treat that as a warning rather than a measurement — a line of capitals or a font with wide figures will run over sooner than the estimate says. As rules of thumb: 11 to 12 pt on a 2.625 by 1 inch address label gives two comfortable lines, 8 pt is about the floor for anything meant to be read across a room, and on a half-inch 80-up label anything over 10 pt leaves no margin at all.

Why alignment goes wrong, and it is almost always scaling

Label sheets are unforgiving because the error compounds. Print at 98% and every label is 2 percent narrower and shallower than it should be — invisible at the top-left corner, and by the twentieth row of an 80-up sheet the text is a full label out of position. Every browser has some version of "fit to page" or "shrink to fit" and several have it on by default. Set the scale to 100%, or "actual size", every time.

The second cause is margins. This page sets its own to zero and places each label from the sheet corner, using the geometry the manufacturer designed to. If the browser also applies a half-inch margin, the entire grid moves down and right by that amount. Set margins to none in the dialog for label output.

The third is the printer itself. Feed skew of a millimetre or two is normal, and it often differs between the cassette and the manual tray. Print one test on plain paper, hold it against a blank sheet of label stock up to a window, and look at the bottom row rather than the top one — that is where any accumulated error shows. If the whole grid is uniformly off, use the even grid mode and nudge the margin until it lines up.

Questions people ask