Why labels print crooked
Crooked labels almost always come down to one of three things, and none of them means your printer is broken. The printer may be shrinking the page slightly, which is called scaling, so each label creeps a little further out of place toward the bottom of the sheet. The sheet may be feeding in at an angle, which tilts the whole print. Or the printer may just set the page down a hair off from where it did last time — ordinary drift that no home printer fully avoids.
Most of the fixes are free changes to the print settings, and they're in the procedure below. The one a tool helps with is drift: an even shift in one direction can't be corrected in the print dialog, but a maker with a calibration nudge can move every badge back by the exact amount it missed. Our Name Badge Maker has that nudge. Buying a better printer isn't the answer — even good ones drift a little, which is the whole reason the nudge exists.
Where the calibration nudge is
On the Name Badge Maker, click the small "Print calibration" heading to expand it. Two boxes appear, "Nudge right (in)" and "Nudge down (in)"; type how far to shift every badge, in inches, and make the PDF again. That control is the only one that fixes even drift; the other causes are fixed in your printer's settings, not in the tool.
Find the cause with one test print, then fix it
Start on plain paper so you don't burn label sheets diagnosing. The first step tells you which of the three causes you have; then do only the matching fix.
- Print one sheet on plain paper and hold it over a blank label sheet.
Print the layout on an ordinary sheet, then hold that sheet on top of an unused label sheet and lift both to a window or lamp so the light shows through. How the printing sits against the label rectangles tells you the cause: everything shifted the same amount, printing that drifts further off the lower down it goes, or printing that sits at a slant. - If the drift grows toward the bottom, set the size to 100%.
Growing drift means the printer is shrinking the page, and the more it shrinks the further each label slides. In the window that opens when you choose Print (the print dialog), find the setting named Scale (sometimes Size or Page Scaling), set it to 100% or "Actual size," and turn off any "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages" checkbox. - If the printing sits at a slant, the paper is feeding in crooked.
This isn't a setting; the sheet is physically going in at an angle. In the paper tray there are thin plastic arms, called paper guides, that slide in against the sides of the stack; nudge them in until they just touch the paper. Don't overfill the tray, and use the single-sheet or manual-feed slot if you have one. - Turn off double-sided printing (duplex).
If double-sided printing (often labeled "two-sided" or "duplex") is on, the printer runs the sheet through an extra set of rollers, and that extra trip can drag a label sheet off line or start peeling a label. Find that option in the print dialog and switch it off for label sheets. - If everything is shifted the same small amount, nudge it back.
An even shift is the drift case, and the nudge fixes it. In the "Print calibration" boxes on the Name Badge Maker, enter how far the test missed and in which direction, make the sheet again, and retest on plain paper. - Still wrong? Check the sheet is really 5395 size.
If the badges come out the wrong size, not just shifted, you're on the wrong layout. Check the label box says 2⅓″ × 3⅜″, which is the 5395 badge; a different size will never line up no matter what you adjust.
The A4-versus-Letter trap
Paper comes in two common sizes: US Letter (8.5 by 11 inches, standard in the US) and A4 (slightly taller and narrower, standard most other places). If the paper size picked in the print dialog doesn't match the sheets in your tray, the printer stretches or shifts the layout to make up the difference and everything slides. Avery 5395 is a US Letter sheet, so set the paper size to US Letter, 8.5 by 11 inches.
What counts as a 5395 sheet
The 5395 badge is 2⅓″ × 3⅜″, eight to a page. Avery sells the exact same size under the numbers 5895, 8395, and 45395, and all of them line up the same way. A box listing any other badge size is a different layout, so no amount of nudging will make it fit this template.
Why the nudge works
A home printer never sets the page down in precisely the same spot twice, so a millimeter or two of even shift is normal, not a sign anything is broken. The nudge boxes move every badge together by the amount you enter, which cancels that shift out. The number usually holds steady for the same printer, so once you find it you can leave it set.
Fix it in the Name Badge Maker →
Setting one up from scratch? See how to print Avery 5395 badges.