Printers

A printer profile remembers, in one place, how a particular machine prints: which channel to use, which template it is loaded with, its resolution, its thermal settings, and the calibration offsets that make the label land where it should. With a profile saved, printing is one click instead of five settings.

You do not need a profile to print. Leaving the Printer picker on "PDF into the print dialog" uses your browser’s print dialog and installed printer driver.

The Free plan saves one profile. Pro saves as many as you have machines — the office sheet printer and the stockroom roll printer are two profiles.

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Add a printer

Press Add printer (or Add your first printer) and fill in:

• Printer name — what you call it in the shop: "Front counter Zebra", "Office sheet printer".
• Template — which decides the label size this printer is loaded with. Once chosen, the stock name and its size are shown underneath.
• Print channel — see below.
• Shift right / Shift down — the calibration offsets, in your unit. Leave at zero until you have printed the calibration sheet.
• Resolution (dpi) — 203 is the thermal default; 300 prints small text and dense barcodes better.
• Use this printer by default — only one profile can hold this.

For the Zebra channel, three more fields appear: Darker / lighter, Speed and Media sensor (gap between labels, black mark, or continuous), plus Device name reported by the printer — as Browser Print lists it. Leave the device name blank to use the first printer found.

Two things about these fields:

• They are empty, not pre-filled. The greyed-out text is a suggestion for the stock you picked; an empty field means "leave the printer alone", and nothing is sent for it.
• Darker / lighter is a correction, not a setting. It adjusts whatever darkness the printer is already on: -30 is much lighter, 0 changes nothing, +30 is much darker. It is not the number on the printer's own darkness scale — typing your printer's current darkness here would add it to itself.

While the form is open, the panel beside it shows exactly what the calibration sheet will look like on that stock.

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Available channels

Markio suggests a channel from the printer's name and the stock, and shows you its reasoning before you override it: a Zebra model number suggests ZPL, a sheet of Avery suggests PDF whatever the printer is, and an unrecognised printer suggests PDF as the standard print method.

What each direct channel cannot do

PDF — cannot print without the browser's print dialog; there is no web API that skips it. The scale must be 100% / Actual size.

Zebra (ZPL) — needs Zebra Browser Print installed and running on the same machine as the browser. Only the printer's resident fonts, so a design using another font prints in the resident one. Cyrillic, Greek and CJK do not print at all on this channel — the resident font has no glyphs for them; use PDF for those labels. Logos and product images are not sent. No sheet stock.

POS — see printing from the till.

Direct DYMO and unattended cloud printing are not offered in this release. A LabelWriter still works through PDF via print dialog and its normal OS driver.

Why direct printing opens a second tab

The separate Markio tab connects to Zebra Browser Print on your computer. If the browser asks for local network access, choose Allow. If you denied it earlier, open the print tab’s site permissions and allow it there.

If Browser Print does not respond, Markio switches to PDF and explains why. Check the printer before retrying: a timeout does not prove that nothing was printed.

Get the label to line up on the roll

1. Open the printer’s ⋯ menu and choose Calibration sheet.
2. Print at 100% / Actual size, using the correct label stock.
3. Measure from the label’s left and top edges to the inner box. The target is 5 mm on each side. The calibration sheet has no saved offset applied.
4. Enter the correction in Shift right and Shift down. For example, if the left gap is 7 mm, enter −2 mm for Shift right.
5. Save the profile and use Test print to check the correction. The calibration sheet itself remains unshifted.

Offsets are limited to ±20 mm. If a larger correction seems necessary, check the selected paper size and print scale first.

You can also adjust alignment in the print tab. Those settings are saved for the job’s printer and template.

Two stocks whose printable area is a guess

The outer dimensions of DYMO 30299 and 30373 are in the library, but their printable areas have not been measured on real rolls. A warning appears when you select either stock. Print and measure one test label before a batch.

Test print

Choose Test print from the printer’s ⋯ menu. A template must be attached to the profile.

The test uses long titles, SKUs and prices from a sample of the 200 most recently updated variants. Check alignment and text, then scan the barcode. This sample does not guarantee that every product will fit.

Printing from Shopify POS

(On the Pro plan.)

Markio adds three things to POS: a home-screen tile for scan-and-print, an action on a product's page, and an action on a cart line. Each opens a small modal, and the label is sent through Shopify's own POS Print API.

What that means in practice:

• On iOS the document goes straight to the platform print dialog.
• On Android a PDF is downloaded to an external viewer instead of printing, so Markio sends labels as HTML there.
• POS prints to whatever printer the device can reach; it cannot pick a specific printer for you.
• Markio uses the POS device's current location for stock and per-location access. Changing or deleting that location in a request cannot remove a role's assigned-location restriction.
• Roles and the print audit identify the Shopify account signed in to the POS device. A staff member who only enters a POS PIN may be different, but Shopify does not authenticate that PIN identity to an app's server. For per-person Markio roles and attribution, each operator must sign in with their own Shopify account and app permission; PIN-only staff inherit the signed-in account's Markio access.
• The device must be online. Labels are prepared by Markio’s server; offline print requests are not queued.

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Troubleshooting

Nothing happens when I press Print

The print tab was blocked by your pop-up blocker. Allow pop-ups for admin.shopify.com.

"This channel talks to a service running on the same computer as the printer"

That banner is information, not an error. It is telling you before you save the profile that Zebra direct needs Browser Print, that printing will open a separate tab, and that it falls back to PDF if the agent does not answer.

The direct channel keeps falling back to PDF

Work through it in this order:

1. Is Browser Print running? It is a separate program you install and does not start itself when the browser opens. Check the tray or menu bar.
2. Is it on the same machine as the browser? The agent is reached over localhost. A printer shared from another computer on the network is not reachable this way — print to it through the PDF channel and the OS driver.
3. Did Chrome ask for local network access? If you denied it once, the prompt does not come back. Click the icon at the left of the address bar in the print tab and allow it.
4. Does your browser allow the connection? Check site permissions and Browser Print’s browser requirements. Use PDF if direct printing is unavailable.
5. Is the device name right? If you filled in "Device name reported by the printer", it has to match exactly what the agent lists. Clear the field to use the first printer found.

Then open Something printed wrong? at the bottom of the print tab and copy the diagnostic report — it includes connection details that help us investigate.

The label prints at the wrong size

Set Scale to 100% or Actual size in the print dialog and select the paper size that matches your labels. Print one test label and measure it. Screen previews cannot confirm the physical dimensions.

The label is the right size but sits a few millimetres off

That is calibration. Print the calibration sheet and follow the steps above.

Cyrillic or Greek text is blank on my Zebra

The ZPL channel can only use the printer's resident fonts, and those have no glyphs for those scripts. Use the PDF channel for those labels.

"The Free plan saves one printer profile"

Correct. Either edit the profile you have, or upgrade. Printing itself is unlimited on both plans.

"Attach a template with a label size to this printer first"

A test print and a calibration sheet both need to know the paper. Pick a template on the profile.

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Related

• Print labels — building the job
• Templates — the design and its symbologies
• Settings → Support — the diagnostic report