Label rework causes cluster into roughly five categories. The good news: all five are self-checkable before you place the order.

1. Is there enough bleed

Labels are mechanically die-cut, and die-to-image registration carries roughly +/-0.5-1mm of error. Artwork that stops at the trim line will show white edges when the cut drifts. The industry norm is 3mm bleed, or 2mm for very small labels.

A die-line template generator produces a vector PDF with bleed, trim and safe-area marks for your finished size, ready to place into Illustrator or CorelDRAW.

2. Colour mode and resolution

Printing is CMYK; RGB files shift grey and dark after conversion. Images below 300 DPI turn mushy. One more easily missed point: solid black text should be K100% only. Four-colour black shows coloured fringing on the slightest misregistration.

A preflight tool checks effective resolution, bleed, colour mode and font embedding locally, in-browser, without uploading your file.

Factory note

"Outline all text before submitting. If a font is not embedded and the printer does not have it, it gets silently substituted, and that usually surfaces only on the finished product."

3. Will the barcode scan

Barcodes that will not scan usually fail for four reasons: insufficient resolution blurring narrow bars; quiet zones eaten away (leave at least 10x the narrow-bar width on each side); print density too high, bleeding the bars; or PDF scaling at print time, which destroys the bar-space ratio.

A subtler trap: the 13th digit of an EAN-13 is a check digit derived from the first 12. Get it wrong and the code is invalid. Verify codes copied from supplier spreadsheets with a GS1 check-digit calculator.

4. Is the material right

Material mismatches usually surface in the field: labels falling off in freezers (standard adhesive fails at low temperature), text vanishing after months outdoors (thermal paper fades in light), smearing on chemical drums. Four factors decide it: substrate, environment, print method, durability.

A material selection wizard narrows it down through five questions.

5. Dimensions and roll format

Finally, confirm finished size and roll parameters. Roll labels must match your applicator: core diameter, labels per roll and unwind direction all need stating at order time, and getting any of them wrong makes the whole roll unusable.

Note: the Chinese-language toolset is at labelonline.cn; English equivalents at paritylabel.com.