How to print name tags

Paper, card weight and label sheets

Ordinary 80gsm copier paper is fine for a one-hour meeting and looks like what it is. For anything worn, handled or reused, you want card: 160–200gsm (roughly 60–80lb cover) is stiff enough to sit in a pouch without buckling and still goes through a domestic printer. Around 250gsm is the ceiling for most desktop machines, and if yours has a rear or manual feed tray, use it — heavy card takes the straight paper path much better than the curved one out of the main cassette.

Pre-cut badge and label sheets remove the trimming and add an alignment problem. The design has to land inside a die-cut window the printer cannot see, so any drift in how the sheet feeds shows up as a name sitting three millimetres off centre on every single label. If you use them, measure the sheet yourself — outside margin, gap between labels, label size — and set those same numbers on the Print tab rather than trusting the number on the packet.

Plain card and a guillotine is more work per badge and far more forgiving. If you have one shot at this and no spare label sheets, plain card is the safer bet.

• 80–120gsm — meetings and one-day workshops. Cheap, floppy, adequate.
• 160–200gsm — the usual choice for a badge that will be worn.
• 250gsm — the heaviest most desktop printers accept. Feels like a business card.
• Matte over gloss. Gloss scuffs, holds fingerprints and reflects the flash in every photo of your event.

Inkjet on heavy card takes longer to dry than you expect. Stack the sheets before the ink has set and the back of one badge offsets onto the front of the next.

Margins and the edge your printer cannot reach

Nearly every desktop printer has an unprintable border: commonly 3 to 5mm at the sides and top, and often 10mm or more at the bottom edge where the rollers grip the sheet. Anything you place inside that border is either clipped or, more often, causes the driver to shrink the whole page to fit. That is the usual cause of badges that come out a few percent too small.

Set your margins to at least 5mm, and give the bottom more than the top. If you want badges printed edge to edge you need a printer that genuinely does borderless, or you print on oversized stock and trim the edges away.

• Start at 8mm all round if you do not know your printer’s limits.
• Give the bottom edge more room than the top — that is where most printers lose the most.
• If a badge crosses a margin in the preview, the layout does not fit. Reduce the badges per row or the gap between them rather than the margin.

Set the sheet up on the Print tab

The Print tab controls how badges land on paper, separately from what the badge itself looks like. Nothing here changes the design.

The preview is literal: what you see is what comes out, page by page. Look at the last page as well as the first, because a partial page is where an awkward layout shows itself.

1. 1Choose US Letter or A4 to match the paper actually in the tray.
2. 2Pick portrait or landscape, and let the preview tell you which fits more badges.
3. 3Set the margins, then the horizontal and vertical gap between badges.
4. 4Set badges per row and per column, and watch the layout reflow.
5. 5Turn crop marks on if you are cutting by hand, off if you are using pre-cut sheets.
6. 6Scroll to the last page of the preview to check what a partial page looks like.

The print dialog: scale, background graphics, duplex

This is where most of the damage happens, and the settings live in your browser or PDF reader rather than in the editor.

Scaling is the big one. Browsers default to shrinking a page to clear the printer’s margins, variously labelled "Fit to printable area", "Shrink to fit" or "Scale to fit". Change it to 100% or Actual size every time. A 3 × 2in badge printed at 96% measures 2.88 × 1.92in, which sits loose in the holder and looks it.

Background graphics is the second. Browsers do not print background colours by default, so a badge with a coloured header band prints as white paper with text on it. The checkbox is usually hidden under "More settings".

• Scale: 100% or Actual size. Not Fit to page, not Shrink oversized pages.
• Background graphics: on.
• Headers and footers: off, or the page URL and today’s date print across your badges.
• The paper size in the dialog must match the paper size on the Print tab, or the driver rescales to reconcile them.
• Duplex: only for double-sided tags, and test it on two sheets before committing the stack.

Downloading the PDF and printing that from a PDF reader sidesteps the browser’s headers, footers and background-graphics behaviour entirely. Set the reader to Actual size and there is nothing else to remember.

Print one test page and measure it

Print page one on the card you are going to use for the whole job, not on paper. Card and paper feed differently, so a test on copier paper tells you less than it looks like it does.

You are checking three numbers: badge width, badge height, and the top margin compared with the bottom margin. If the badge measures a few millimetres under, scaling is still on somewhere. If the top and bottom margins differ by more than a millimetre or two, the sheet is feeding crooked.

1. 1Print page one on your real card stock.
2. 2Measure the badge width and height against the size you set.
3. 3Slide it into a holder to confirm it fits without sliding around.
4. 4Compare the top and bottom margins of the sheet.
5. 5Fix whatever is off, print page one again, and only then run the whole job.

Cutting and trimming

Crop marks sit just outside each badge so nothing printed gets cut through, and they give you a line to square the blade against. A guillotine or rotary trimmer beats scissors by a wide margin — not because scissors cut badly, but because a trimmer cuts the same line forty times.

Cut every vertical line across the whole sheet first, then every horizontal one. Cutting badge by badge accumulates error, and the last badge on the sheet ends up visibly narrower than the first.

For double-sided tags, print all the fronts, then reload the stack and print the backs. Two sheets as a test first, because printers disagree about which way a stack should go back in and a front-to-back offset of 2mm reads as a fault. Registration between the sides is never exact, so keep the back simple and 5mm clear of the trim edge.

When a sheet comes out wrong

Almost every bad sheet is one of these, and each has a specific cause rather than a general one. Work down the list before reprinting anything.

• Everything is slightly too small — scaling. Set 100% or Actual size and print again.
• The whole sheet is skewed by a degree or two — the paper is feeding crooked. Fan the stack, square it against the guides, and load fewer sheets at once. Heavy card in a full tray is the usual cause.
• The first badge is right and the last is 3mm out — you cut badge by badge. Cut whole lines across the sheet instead.
• A coloured band or block printed white — background graphics was off.
• A URL and a date across the top of the sheet — headers and footers were on in the browser print dialog.
• The bottom row is clipped — your bottom margin is inside the printer’s unprintable area. Add 5mm and reprint.
• Smudges on the back of the next sheet — inkjet on heavy card. Let each sheet dry before stacking.