Choosing a barcode type is easiest if you know who (or what) will be scanning the barcode.

A barcode is a symbol that allows a barcode scanner (or camera) to read information and send to a computer.

A barcode scanner reads a barcode symbol using either a laser or a camera. Camera-based scanners are often called optical scanners.

Laser barcode scanners are faster and simpler and usually only work with 1D barcodes. Laser barcode scanners work best with matte (not glossy) finishes. Laser barcode scanners must be oriented correctly to scan.

Optical and camera scanners are slightly slower, but they work with 2D barcodes such as QR codes, on glossy surfaces, and can be scanned in any orientation.

There are broadly two types of barcodes: 1D and 2D. You can think of 1D as simple traditional 

-codes such as UPC and EAN, while 2D barcodes have more symbols and blocks such as QR code and Datamatrix.

Ask yourself, "who or what will be scanning this barcode?"

When in doubt, seek advice from the people or users that will be scanning your barcode. They will likely have a preference or specification for you to follow.

There are limits to what kind of information can be stored in a barcode. UPC barcodes can only contain numbers and depending on the variant, can contain either 2, 5, 8 or 12 numerical digits. Read more about 

Some barcode scanners can be configured to only scan certain kinds of barcodes. This can be helpful if your product has many different barcode types, and you only want to scan one of the barcodes. To learn more about configuring your barcode scanner, consult your barcode scanner manual.

How do I choose a barcode type?

Label LIVE can use all fonts on your computer. Just make sure it's installed like any other font. If you recently installed a font, Label LIVE may need to be restarted for it to use the new font.

When you share a design with a custom font make sure every computer has that font. Having the correct fonts installed will ensure your design looks the same on every computer and printer.

Label LIVE built-in fonts are indicated with a blue star. These special fonts are safe to use because they are available on every Label LIVE installation, regardless of the system's installed fonts.

How do I add a new font?

From the printer's perspective, there is nothing special about circle or strangely shaped labels. Every printer receives a print job as a rectangle. To print a circle, you simply send a "square" image that happens to have data in the shape of a circle.

Shapes can be added to a label design that help indicate the edge of the label. Click the "eye" icon to hide the shape in the final print.

If the rectangular label area is a distraction you can turn off the background by selecting a custom shape.

The actual print job will always be a rectangle. To see this effect, choose Print > Print Preview and inspect the PDF.

This technique isn't limited to circles. You can create the same guides for advanced designs. Learn more from our guide.

How do I print a circle or an oval?

Barcodes are often accompanied by human-readable text. Usually, this "barcode value" is found underneath the barcode. Your design might benefit from having a different font, or a formatted version of the barcode value.

The basic idea is to use a variable for both the barcode and the text. Start by learning about variables and how they're used throughout Label LIVE.

Barcodes such as UPC and EAN often calculate a "check-digit" that gets appended to the end of the value. Although barcodes often require the use of check-digits, some users would rather show the value without the check digit. Learn more about that process here:

Need more text in your barcodes? You can easily add prefixes with Label LIVE.

We have many other guides and FAQ answers covering a wide range of barcode topics: 

How can I customize a barcode?

When creating a new design it's easy to get carried away by adding a handful of text objects. However, much of this text is related and needs to stay grouped together so that the entire address flows properly.

To fix this problem, combine all the variables into one text object.

Label LIVE can do this for you. Drag and select all the text objects on the design.

Click the blue button and adjust your new text box to look absolutely perfect.

Need to remove blank lines? Check out this FAQ:

You can also build a text object by appending variables using this button.

How do I merge text objects?

Setup rules to hide and show design objects.

Combine two objects of the same kind to create alternative layouts based on the length or content of data variables.

Having trouble getting every variation of a label to look perfect? You can try setting up two text objects.

Show the first text object when text is short. Show the second text object with the text is longer. Perhaps the second text object is set to Word-Wrap, while the first is set to Auto-Fit.

Sometimes addresses include blank lines. To hide blank lines, see our related FAQ below.

How to hide and show objects based on data?

Learn more about date and time formatting.

How do I add Julian dates? 

How do I rotate text, images or barcodes?

The Label LIVE Home screen shows a list of recently saved designs.

These designs can be "pinned" to the top so they do not "fall off" the list. Just click the blue Pin button.

More importantly, they provide one-button access to "Duplicate" the design.

Duplicating a design is like opening a template because the new design is ready to be saved to a new location.

How do I create a template?

Label LIVE tries to prevent you from "breaking" a barcode. A broken (or failed) barcode is highly frustrating because it won't scan with a barcode scanner.

Why can't I resize a barcode?

When your print job requires many labels on a "page" you can rely on Label LIVE to arrange them from left to right, top to bottom. This solution works for two scenarios:

Label LIVE works with popular Avery and ULINE label sheets.

Label LIVE works with popular "grouped" labels such as horticulture plant tags and CryoTags from Diversified BioTech and USA Scientific.

Label LIVE makes it easy to adjust all of the dimensions, margins and spacing to get pixel-perfect aligned label pages.

Measure one label and enter in the height and width (red), ensuring that the orientation arrow (blue) is aligned with the direction the labels feed through the printer.

Nobody likes to waste labels. That's why we recommend using Print Preview to test. The generated PDF is great to learn how Label LIVE will work with your printer without wasting expensive labels.

box to print label borders, margin lines, and 1" (or 1cm) dotted lines. Test pages can be printed on plain paper. To verify label placement, stack the plain paper test page on top of a blank sheet and hold both up to a bright light. You can easily see where alignment needs to be corrected.

Hover over the page layout to show the Page Setup. Here you can enter the page size, which is the space containing many labels (e.g. a full sheet).

Click "PAGE SIZE" to change the page size to Letter, A4, 4x6" shipping or 2x2" generic square. You can also enter in your own custom page size. For example, 4-across horticulture plant tags (e.g. 10x1") might have a Page size of 10x4".

Labels are arranged from left to right and top to bottom.

Keep at 100% unless you find that the alignment lines are not to scale. For example, if the 1" alignment lines are printing at 0.95" then a scale factor of 105% could be applied to try to match the dimensions. This is largely trial and error. Printer drivers are responsible for these discrepancies, and worse, they can change between printer drivers. Are we having fun yet?!

Before you print, adjust the Label Copies to print 1 

. This will cause all labels to become blue in the preview.

: To skip used labels on a sheet, type the number of labels you want to skip in the "Skip Labels" field. Skipping a label will preview a gray box for the skipped labels.

Click the print button (blue) and watch the PDF open. Note the red margin lines (left and top), the 1" dotted lines, and the label outlines.

 when you are satisfied and ready to print to a real page.

How do I setup a custom page or sheet with many labels?

Label LIVE uses markup to stylize a text object's font. What this means in practice is learning how to use 

If you're familiar with HTML you're in good company. If not, don't worry! It's easy.

Of course, markup can be included in spreadsheet or CSV data. Read more about it here...

How do you make text bold, underline, italic or striked?

Sometimes when designing a label with multiple lines, the lines themselves might be optional. In the case where you're using variables and a form, this can lead to annoying blank lines showing in your final design.

For example, here's a basic address label with name, two address lines, a city, state and zipcode. What happens when the second address line is blank?

Grrr.... Easy fix! Click the eraser button on the text object.

Empty lines are now removed from the text object.

Best of all, the second address line will display properly if added to the form.

This won't work if NAME, ADDRESS, etc are all in separate text objects. In order for Label LIVE to remove blank lines, the lines need to appear one after another, like this:

{NAME}
{ADDRESS}
{ADDRESS2}
{CITY}, {STATE} {ZIP}

Here are a few other ideas to make your label designs awesome.

How do I hide lines in a text box?

Sometimes you may find it necessary to indent the first line of text because of pre-printed text on a custom label. For example, on an ingredient label where the text "Ingredients:" already exists.

Your job is to put a title at the top and the ingredients starting right after  

To start, place a non-printing placeholder of 

 in the approximate location of the pre-printed text. Use the "eye" button to make the object not print. Notice how it turns gray.

This is here to aide in visual design and alignment.

Now, add the title text box for the product description. I chose to use 

(Auto Fit) so the text would automatically shrink to fit.

Now, add a text box that overlaps the Ingredients, and add a dozen spaces in front of the variable to push the first line to the right. Make sure to select 

 so the ingredients wrap to the next line.

Now you can easily adjust your title and ingredients on a simple form.

When printed, the "Ingredients:" will be missing, and the actual ingredient list will be indented to make room for the pre-printed ingredient text.

Remember, we intentionally hide "Ingredients:" because we are printing to a label where that text is pre-printed.

How do I indent the first line of text?

To add a perforation line, place a line object on the design and click the eye icon to make the line non-printing. Adjust the thickness and dots to your liking.

How do I mark a perforation line on a label design?

After 14 days, you can choose between a one-time license or an inexpensive monthly label software subscription that you can cancel at any time. Try it out and see how easy label printing can be.

14 Day Free Trial

No risk, no credit card—design labels today

It's easy to learn our software so you can get the job done. Label LIVE has just 4 menus—each with a specific purpose. We've simplified label printing.

Fun and Easy to Learn

Like cooking in your own kitchen—everything has a place

Fun and easy to learn

Label LIVE is the only label printing software that works out of the box on both Windows and Mac. Print labels with flexibility and ease, no matter your operating system or printer model.

Works on Windows and Mac

Finally, effortless labels in both worlds

We are available every day by email and phone. Since we're a small independent shop, you get to talk directly to developers and entrepreneurs who live and breathe label printing.

Dependable Support

Our customers rate our support the best in the industry

Anyone can download and use Label LIVE to print labels. It's easy to use, priced right, always available without Internet, helpfully supported by humans when you need us, and constantly improving based on your feedback.

Trusted Worldwide

The best printing experience starts with the right hardware. Get a mydpi thermal printer, designed for seamless compatibility with Label LIVE - so you can print labels faster, easier, and without restrictions.

Recommended Label Printers

Need a new label printer? Bundle and Save

Bundled with mydpi

It can be a pain to fire up your spreadsheet program to print a set of labels. To work faster, just pop open Label LIVE's built-in spreadsheet editor. Add as many columns and rows as you need.

Built-in Spreadsheet

Edit data and print labels without leaving Label LIVE

Create thousands of label variations based on data from Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers or plain CSV text files. Use your own serial numbers, prices, descriptions, weights and dates. Easily integrate shared data from Google Sheets, Dropbox, OneDrive, and others.

Excel, CSV and Cloud Data

Turn a spreadsheet into individual labels

Use variables to update text, barcodes, images and even colors across an entire set of unique labels. Label LIVE connects smoothly with your spreadsheets to determine how and where your data gets printed. 

Variables

Data Forms enable operators to get the job done with less error. Each Form is progressively simpler. Choose the level of detail your operators feel the most comfortable using.

Forms

Three different ways to view your data and print labels

When you need a serial number, you can handle it in a few clicks with Label LIVE. Each time a label prints, the number will change by an amount you specify. You can count up or count down.

Serial Number Generation

If your spreadsheet lists time in one format, but your labels need to use another, Label LIVE can translate. Our data tools can even handle adding time onto dates.

Date and Time Support

Calculate and print date and time in the formats you need

Convert effortlessly between weight units and display the weight in a format that makes sense to your customers.

Weight Calculation

Price-computing label machines can be cumbersome to use. Label LIVE makes it easy to set up and maintain beautiful custom label designs that use existing prices for bulk repack.

Price Calculation

Multiply quantity and price-per variables

Round currency, define precision, and format prices with leading or trailing zeros. There's a lot you can do with a spreadsheet and formulas. For everything else, use Label LIVE.

Price Formatting

When data on your label needs to toggle between a few known values, you can add them as a list, making them easily selectable.

Simple Lists

Capture and crop full-color photos for ID cards, visitor badges, and employee passes. Label LIVE uses your computer’s camera with built-in on-device face detection to automatically center and size each photo, giving every label a professional look.

Camera + Face Detection

Use any camera to instantly add color portraits to visitor badges and ID cards

Camera and Face Detection

When it's time to print, a simple arrow points in the direction that the label will be come out. Design labels in the orientation that makes sense to you, without waste or confusion.

Size and Orientation

Take the guesswork out of clunky "landscape" and "portrait" modes

Label Size and Orientation

Label LIVE automatically scales text size to fit within your label width, anchors text fields to corners, and deletes blank lines. When you need to incorporate a lot of information into your label, our design tools keep it neat and consistent.

Complex Text

Complex Text Handling

Label LIVE lets you customize your design with squares, circles and lines. Each object has separate fill and outline colors. Outlines can sport custom dash-dot patterns and squares can round their corners for a professional look. Read more in our guide below.

Shapes and Lines

Full control over dashes, dots, thickness and color

Label LIVE handles high-resolution images both large and small. Add any image you want to your design—you can make it work with full-color printers and black-and-white low DPI models alike.

Images

What you see on the label designer screen is what prints on the label

Generate just about any kind of barcode. As you input your data, labels update instantly. All of our supported barcodes integrate seamlessly with your business workflow.

Barcodes

Beautifully boring UPCs to magically mundane QR Codes

Save all of your custom Label LIVE designs to your computer for future printing. Need to make a new label based on an old design? Duplicate a saved design template with a single click, then keep customizing. Read more in our FAQ below.

Saved Label Files

Save and re-use designs on Windows and macOS

Saved Design Files

When you're printing labels from a spreadsheet, text and barcodes can grow larger or shrink smaller. Anchor points help you rein in the complexity of dynamic data.

Anchor Points

When text or barcodes change size, make sure they stay put

Non-printable objects let you set aside space in your layout to incorporate what's already on your labels. Check out the related guide below.

Non-Printing Objects

Design around die-cut borders or pre-printed label art

You can "program" your label based on spreadsheet data. Label LIVE gives you easy-to-use variables for advanced label printing. Read more in a guide below.

Dynamic Color

Change the color of text, shapes and barcodes using spreadsheet data

Until now, generating labels with dynamic images would have involved a programmer. With Label LIVE, you can use your data to pull up the right image for each label, via URLs or filesystem paths on your computer.

Dynamic Images

Printing to sheets of labels should be easy, but without Label LIVE it's a nightmare. Label LIVE puts the adjustment power in your hands to craft pixel-perfect PDFs. Use the Sheet Setup feature to align your sheets precisely, without tedious trial-and-error.

Multiple Labels on Sheets

Render multiple labels per page and align with popular sheets from Avery and U-LINE

You choose the best printer for the job and Label LIVE will make it work. You can easily take a design from one printer and modify it to work on another, totally different printer.



Full Color or Black & White

Works with one-color thermal printers and full-color CMYK inkjet and laser printers.

AirPrint is a technology that lets you print wirelessly without the need to download or install drivers. Using an AirPrint printer with Label LIVE is the gold standard in label printing.

AirPrint Support

Automatically detect and print to AirPrint printers

Label LIVE's powerful features help you design for low-DPI printers. Design preview allows you to modify images to look pixel-perfect.

Dithering for Low-DPI Printers

Optimize the dithering (dot-detail) of your label images with two clicks

Trigger your label printing from the command line, across your network, or by saving spreadsheets/CSVs to special batch folders. Read more in our guides below.

Nerd-Friendly Integration

Nerd Friendly Integration

Use a spreadsheet to control how many labels print. Select the variable on the Print tab and Label LIVE will adapt smoothly to your data.

Dynamic Copies

Flexible controls for label selection and data duplication

When you need to print tons of unique barcodes, just get your data and design set up, and Label LIVE will generate and save a set of images in one PDF or PNG file. Read more in our guide below.

Batch PDFs or PNGs

Generate Batch PDFs or PNGs

Once you've created the label design you want with Label LIVE's powerful, intuitive tools, you can keep it consistent. Lock design elements, or freeze out certain buttons to prevent unintentional changes.

Locked Designs

Minimize operator error by locking or freezing a design

Locked and Frozen Designs

No need to install pesky drivers for our supported thermal printers—just connect your computer and printer and start printing. Label LIVE is compatible with dozens of leading thermal printer models.

Driverless Thermal Printing

Label LIVE directly supports popular thermal printers via USB

Design Specific Questions

How do I choose a barcode type?

How do I add a new font?

How do I print a circle or an oval?

How can I customize a barcode?

How do I merge text objects?

How to hide and show objects based on data?

How do I add Julian dates?

How do I rotate text, images or barcodes?

How do I create a template?

Why can't I resize a barcode to a specific size?

How do I setup a custom page or sheet with many labels?

How do you style text with bold, underline, italic or striked?

How do I hide blank lines in a text box?

How do I indent the first line of text?

How do I mark a perforation line on a label design?

Get more from Label LIVE

Guides

Find Answers

Barcodes