If you're looking for printer troubleshooting tips for Windows, you can find that here.

Getting printers to behave can be extremely fiddly, and is often the biggest hurdle for newcomers and veterans alike. If you're struggling with printers refusing to print, printing with the wrong size paper, or with scaling issues, take a look at the tips below!

Nine times out of ten, ConsignCloud's remote printing system works out of the box, if your printers are set up properly on your computer. The best way to find out what part of the system is broken is to first work on printing using your browser or system dialog, which allows you to find out whether it's your document, printer, computer, or ConsignCloud that is misconfigured. 

Most places in ConsignCloud have an export option; whether you're printing checks, labels or receipts, you should be able to download a PDF file, or open in it a new browser tab.

At this point, you have access to the exact document that ConsignCloud is trying to print remotely, which means you can confidently test one setting at a time by opening your PDF with Finder, and selecting File > Print.

If you get a "[E_SSL_CACERT] SSL certificate problem: certificate has expired" error when attempting to log in to the print client, please click on Network Settings and update the "HTTP Library" to "Requests". Click "Back to login" to try again.

This can be caused by your printer being unplugged (either into your computer, or into the wall), not installed, or being paused. 

To diagnose, open System Preferences > Printers & Scanners. If your printer is not listed on the left, that means it hasn't yet been installed. Click the plus button at the bottom-left and follow the steps to add a new printer.

If the printer is listed and still not printing, double-click on it to open its print queue. Make sure the green button at the top says "Pause". If it says "Resume", click on it to un-pause the printer. 

If you get a message saying "The printer is not connected", that means your printer is not plugged in, drivers are not installed, or something more fundamental is wrong — at this point it's probably best to contact your printer manufacturer for support.

You might also get a message saying that the printer is "Out of labels". In this case, you might need to change the label roll, and unpause the printer. If that still doesn't work, try resetting the printing system (more on that below).

If you are able to get your printer to print when using the system or browser print dialog, but not through ConsignCloud, you'll need to troubleshoot the ConsignCloud Print Client, which you can download from your Printing Settings page. First, make sure it's installed and running on the computer where your printer is plugged in — it should show as an icon in your system tray.

If you've already done this, but the print client doesn't automatically start when you turn on your computer, make sure you've copied the .dmg file to your Applications folder.

Next, make sure you're logged in with the correct account — your login information is not your ConsignCloud login, it is the email and password provided on your Printing Settings page. Once you're logged in, you should be able to choose a printer in ConsignCloud and print directly to it. If printing fails, or the label is blank, you should check that your print client's default printing backend is set to "Engine5".

If you're still not able to print after all that, please take a look at this article for more tips, or contact support. If you're having problems with scaling, rotating, or definition, please read on.

In order to get your label to print in the right orientation, and on the right part of the page, there are several places where you need to check the paper size and rotation.

First, go to Settings > Printing > Labels, and click the edit icon for your label. In the right-hand pane, you'll see an option for Paper Size. Make sure that is set to the size of your physical label, so for example a DYMO 30334 label should be set to 1.25 x 2.25 inches.

Next, open the system print dialog on your Mac by printing a pdf directly as shown at the beginning of this article. This step is necessary, because paper sizes are not completely configurable via the System Preferences menu. From there, select the paper size that matches the dimensions of your label template. 

If the correct paper size isn't available, click on Manage Custom Sizes at the bottom of that same drop-down. From here, you can click on the plus button to create a new paper size.

Make sure to name it descriptively, and fill in the width and height based on how the label comes out of the printer, rather than how your label template is oriented. By convention, it's the the bottom of the page that comes out first. Once you have your paper size set up, be sure to assign it to your printer.

Sometimes, barcodes will come out looking blurry and smudged, which makes it hard or impossible to get them to scan. This can be fixed by orienting the barcode so that it comes out of the printer parallel to the bars, as shown below. 

This way, the ink isn't being smudged across the barcode, but away from it. Another thing that might help is to slow your print speed, if that's an option on your hardware.

If the barcode isn't visible at all, make sure it's sized wide enough on the template to include some wiggle room, since different SKUs might have different sizes when printed.

Similar to barcodes, depending on how a text element is set up it may be visible in the editor, but disappear when it's printed. The solution here is either to set Fit to shrink, or resize the text element to include some slack for more text.

Receipt printers often come with a mode that allows printing just enough paper to accommodate the receipt. However, since ConsignCloud prints using PDF files, we're not able to take advantage of that feature (though that's something we're hoping to fix in the future). 

For now, we recommend setting the paper size for your receipt printer to 72mm x 200mm, which should be enough to accommodate any receipt ConsignCloud generates.

If printing fails, or the label is blank, you should check that your print client's default printing backend is set to "Engine5". You can do this from within the client under the "Printers" tab.

Sometimes no matter what you do, your computer just won't listen. It will print with a different paper size than you've chosen, or reset your settings every print, duplicate printers, or scale down your print job so that it looks tiny. If you've gone through all the tips below, and are still not able to get things to print, it may be time to reset the printing system.

This is not as scary as it sounds, but if you have a less well-supported printer, you might need to re-install drivers after resetting the printing system.

First, go to System Preferences and click on Printers & Scanners. Next, right click on one of the printers in the list to the left, then click on "Reset printing system...".

Your computer will ask for your password, then clear all your printers and their settings. At that point, you'll need to re-add your printers by pressing the "+" button at the bottom of the list. If all goes well, your printers should start working properly again!

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