The first thing you should do before printing any label is to figure out the alignment adjustment that will allow your printer to exactly print on a label.
Step 1) Click on the CD project type
Step 2) Select the PRINT tab
Step 3) Insert a plain piece of paper in your printer. Click on the TEST PATTERN tab. This will print a test page on your printer. In the upper left corner of the test page you will see a crosshair. This crosshair is supposed to be exactly located 20 mm from the upper left corner. Measure this crosshair, and determine how many millimeters it needs to be moved to get to 20 mm. Click on the ALIGNMENT button in the PRINT section, and use the arrow buttons to move the ring icon in half millimeter steps to fix the misalignment. Print another TEST PATTERN, and verify that the large crosshair is as close as possible to 20mm. The small crosshair shows where the printer used to think 20mm was. If you have multiple printers you will need to keep track of the alignment adjustment for each printer, as there is only one alignment offset stored.
2. Testing your paper
After performing alignment, you should print out one label on plain paper, and hold it up against the light to verify that the alignment is good, so as to avoid wasting expensive label paper.
3. Designing a label
Click on a project type. Import a graphic by clicking on the PHOTO tab, and clicking NEW. You will be asked for the location of a graphic file on your hard disk. You can scale the picture up and down with the size slider on the left side.
Click on the TEXT tab to work with text. Click on the NEW button to create a new text box. Once you type in the text, you can click EDIT to change the text again.
After putting in your text, you may wish to draw in back of the text to make the text stand out better. Click on the PAINT tab, and use the solid rectangle tool to provide a backdraw for the text. You can adjust the roundness of the corners by using the slider.
To print the label, click on the PRINT tab, and select which paper you are going to print on. Once you have selected a paper type, in the case of a CD label, you will probably have the choice of printing the label on the top part of the paper, the bottom part, or both at once.
Special Notes
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Special note about ALPS printers:
The ALPS McroDry printers, although commendable for their waterproof labels and great quality, have an unusually large bottom margin of 0.56 inches. If you attempt to print a two-up CD label, when the printer gets to the bottom of the second label, it may go past a point of no return, and the paper will fall out of the printer before it is finished, thereby ruining the label, and probably ruining the next page as well. To prevent this from happening, we recommend that you only print the top label of a two label sheet each time, and print the bottom label by turning the paper around and printing the top label again.
