If you're looking for printer troubleshooting tips for MacOS, 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!

Of course, as any tech support rep will tell you, there are two things you can do to solve any computer problem: turn your computer off and on again; unplug your printer and plug in back in again. Always start with a quick reset — it will sometimes save you hours of fiddling with settings and wondering why they're not getting applied!

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 Chrome, and clicking on the print icon in the top-right-hand corner of the window.

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

To diagnose, search for Printers & Scanners in the Start Menu. If your printer is not listed, that means it hasn't yet been installed. Click the plus button to refresh the list of printers. If your printer is still not listed, you may have to manually install the printer, or contact the manufacturer for support.

If the printer is listed and still not printing, it may be locked by another program, usually DYMO's software (if it's a dymo printer). Make sure DYMO's LabelWriter software is not running, and restart your computer to try again.

If you're still not able to print PDFs to the printer, 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.

If you are able to get your printer to print when using the system or browser printing 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.

Note that when you run the installer, it will ask if you would like to install the print client as a "Windows Service". Do not check this box unless you're running the client on a computer with multiple active users. 

Also, be careful to only install the client once, as multiple installations will cause duplicate copies of every document to be sent to the printer. To uninstall, go to Control Panel > Programs and Features to uninstall duplicate installations.

Next, make sure you're logged in with the correct account — your login information is going to be the same as your main ConsignCloud login. 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 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, from the Windows Printers & Scanners settings, click on your printer and then select Manage, then Printing Preferences > Advanced.

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 you get a "[E_SSL_CACERT] SSL certificate problem: certificate has expired", or "SSL error with api.consigncloud.com" error when attempting to log in to the print client, you have an out of date encryption certificate in your computer's certificate store.

To remove it, open the Start menu, type "certmgr" and run the Certificate Manager utility. Then, find the certificate which was issued by "DST Root CA X3" for "R3" and has the expiry date of 2021-09-29 19:21:40 UTC. Deleting the wrong certificate can break your computer's functionality, so be sure to remove the correct one. There are several certificates that look similar, make sure the name and date match exactly.

Once that's done, you should be able to restart your ConsignCloud Print Client and log in.