PR Labeller Help

1  Getting started

Install it properly first

Drag PR Labeller out of the disk image and into your Applications folder before you open it. An app run straight from a mounted disk image is put in a read-only holding area by macOS, where it cannot remember your printer, your folders or your window size — everything appears to work, and then forgets itself every time you quit.

You need a LabelWriter driver

PR Labeller does not contain any label sizes of its own. It asks macOS what your printer can take, and offers you exactly those. That is deliberate: the sizes you see are the sizes your own printer actually handles, rather than a list copied from somewhere that might not match.

So the printer needs to be installed on this Mac in the ordinary way, with its driver, before there is anything to print on. If the label sizes are empty, see no label sizes appear.

Your first label

1. Choose your printer in the PRINT panel.
2. Pick the label size loaded in the printer.
3. If the LABELS panel is empty, press Add Sample Labels. Three examples are made for you, sized to the stock your own printer takes, and put in Documents/PR Labeller Labels.
4. Click a label to open it, then Edit to change it.
5. Print.

If you already have labels from DYMO Label, point the app at them instead: Choose Folder… in the LABELS panel, or Settings ▸ Folders. They usually live in Documents/DYMO Label Software/Label Files.

Renaming, duplicating and deleting a label

The ⋯ button in the LABEL panel carries Rename…, Duplicate and Reveal in Finder; Delete sits beside it. All four are in the File menu too, so nothing needs a right-click.

• Duplicate is the quickest way to start a new label — most design work begins from the one that is nearly right.
• Delete moves the file to the Trash rather than destroying it, so Finder's Put Back undoes it.
• Rename changes the file on disk, so ⌘Z will not undo it. Rename it back instead.

If a design exists as both a .label and a .prlabel file, renaming or deleting takes the pair together — one without the other is a design that disagrees with itself.

Tidying a messy address

Addresses copied from a marketplace order arrive in whatever state the buyer typed them: everything on one line, ALL CAPITALS, no capitals at all, stray commas and full stops, and often a title or an order code that does not belong on an envelope.

Press Tidy while editing a contact and the app splits the address at the commas, puts one element on each line, fixes the upper and lower case, and removes titles, letters after the name, marketplace user names and codes, and a telephone number left on the end.

Two things make it safe to use without checking every time:

• The original stays on screen underneath until you undo the tidy or move to another contact, so you can compare the two.
• The app compares the words and numbers before and after, and warns you if anything disappeared that it did not mean to remove.

It deliberately never re-orders lines or moves a postcode. Getting the arrangement wrong is the one mistake that can cost a delivery, so it leaves that to you. Postcodes are left alone, as is anything you have already capitalised yourself — so McDonald stays McDonald.

Tidy Selected Contacts in the Contacts menu does the same to a whole selection at once, and Undo Contact Change puts it back.

2  Your labels, and the two file formats

This is the one part of the app worth reading properly, because it is the only place PR Labeller behaves differently from what you may expect.

Why there are two

DYMO's format cannot describe everything you can now draw. Two things in particular:

• Angles. It stores four rotations only — upright, and a quarter, half or three-quarter turn. Not 12°, not 45°.
• Shapes. It knows four: rectangle, ellipse, horizontal line, vertical line. It has no word for a triangle, a heart, a star or a rounded corner.

Rather than quietly refusing to draw those things, or quietly changing them when you save, PR Labeller lets you draw them and then tells you what saving will cost.

The warning triangle

An orange triangle beside an object's angle or shape means this particular thing cannot be written into a .label file as drawn. The same warning appears in the status line. It is not an error and nothing is broken — the label prints exactly as you see it.

What happens when you save one

Saving a label containing something DYMO's format cannot hold offers you a choice:

Keep Exact Angles (.prlabel)

Saves a .prlabel file alongside. Everything is preserved and prints exactly as drawn. DYMO Label will not open it.

Square Up and Save

Writes an ordinary .label file, rounding the angle to the nearest quarter turn and substituting the closest shape DYMO does have. The file stays compatible; the design changes.

If a design has neither an odd angle nor an odd shape, none of this appears and it saves as an ordinary .label file.

A label that exists in both formats shows twice in the list, with · PR Labeller format under the second one.

3  Editing a label

Press Edit and the preview panel becomes the editing panel — its number turns red so it is obvious which mode you are in. The ✕ at its top right returns you to the preview.

Selecting

Click an object on the label to select it, or choose it from the menu beneath the label. Drag to move it; drag a corner handle to resize; drag the handle above it to rotate. Hold ⇧ while dragging a corner to keep the proportions.

Objects snap to the label's edges and centres, with pink guides to show what they have caught on. Turn that off in Object ▸ Snap to Edges and Centres if you would rather place things freely.

Adding things

+ Add puts a new object on the label:

Text

Plain text at whatever size, face and alignment you set.

Address

Text that is filled in from whichever contact is selected when you print, so one label can serve a whole address book.

Picture

An image file. Once placed it can be aligned within its box, mirrored left to right or top to bottom, replaced in place, and the box snapped tight to the picture or loosened around it. See snapping and loosening below.

Barcode

Type the value; the bars are drawn from it.

Shape

A circle, square, rectangle, triangle, oval, heart, spade, club, diamond or star. Choose the shape on one line; the fill shade, the outline shade and the outline weight on the next.

Pictures: snapping, loosening, and why alignment sometimes does nothing

A picture has two separate things: the frame you drag around the label, and the picture drawn inside it. The three scaling settings decide how the second follows the first.

Fit in the box

As large as will go inside the frame. The picture therefore always touches one pair of opposite edges — so it can be moved along the other pair, and not at all along that one.

Fill the box

The whole frame, edge to edge. There is no slack in any direction, so the alignment buttons have nothing to do.

Actual size

The picture's own size, whatever the frame does. This is the only setting where a picture can float clear of all four edges.

Snap Box pulls the frame tight around the picture. Unsnap Box adds two millimetres of room, and can be pressed repeatedly. Under Fit in the box it widens or heightens whichever pair of edges the picture is not already touching — growing the other pair would only make the picture bigger, which is not loosening anything. Under Actual size it adds the two millimetres on all four sides at once.

Fills and shades

Fill and outline are chosen as a percentage of black rather than from a colour picker, because a LabelWriter prints in black on white and nothing else. A grey is produced by the printer driver as a dither pattern of black dots — so a 50% fill is a fine chequer, not a soft grey, and small text over one is hard to read.

If you change your mind

⌘Z undoes anything, repeatedly, back to the state the label was in when you opened it. Revert to Saved in the File menu throws away every change at once.

4  Contacts

PR Labeller reads DYMO address books (.abx) and plain .csv files. On first run it looks in Documents/DYMO Label Software/Address Books; if yours is elsewhere, use Open Address Book… or Settings ▸ Folders.

Selecting several

• ⇧-click to select everything between the last one and this one.
• ⌘-click to add or remove one at a time, wherever it is in the list.

Select several contacts and printing produces one label each, in list order.

Editing safely

Any change to the address book takes a dated backup of the whole file first. Contacts ▸ Restore Address Book… lists them and puts one back. Contacts ▸ Undo reverses the last change without going near the backups.

5  Printing

Choose the printer, the label size, and how many copies. Selecting contacts prints one label per contact; with none selected it prints the label as it stands. A run of more than a handful asks you to confirm before it starts, with the total, so a mis-typed number does not empty a roll.

If the printing sits off-centre

Settings ▸ Print alignment nudges every printed label, in millimetres, in the orientation you see on screen. Print Alignment Test prints one label with centre lines and a ruler on it: measure from the centre line to the cut edge at each end, and enter the difference.

The printer lays down 300 dots to the inch, so roughly 0.085 mm is the smallest step that changes anything on paper. Rotate every label 180° is there for stock that feeds the other way round.

Saving a PDF

File ▸ Export PDF… writes the label at its true size, which is the reliable way to send one to somebody else or to a different printer.

6  If something is wrong

No label sizes appear

Almost always this means macOS has no LabelWriter driver, or the printer is not installed. PR Labeller asks the driver what sizes exist, so with no driver there is nothing to ask.

• Open System Settings ▸ Printers & Scanners and check the printer is listed there. If it is not, add it.
• If it is listed but no sizes appear here, the queue may have been set up with a generic driver. Remove the printer and add it again, letting macOS choose the LabelWriter driver.
• The driver comes from the printer's manufacturer, not from this app. PR Labeller ships nothing of theirs and never will.

Settings ▸ Diagnostics reports what it found, including the line cups queue: NOT MATCHED, which is the usual culprit.

My printer has disappeared, or printing suddenly fails

If a printer that worked yesterday has vanished from the list — or printing fails with a message about a file not being found, which is what macOS unhelpfully says when it cannot find the printer itself — the queue has usually dropped off rather than anything being wrong with your labels.

1. Check the printer is listed in System Settings ▸ Printers & Scanners. If it is missing, that is the problem.
2. Unplug it from both power and USB, wait a few seconds, and reconnect. A USB thermal printer occasionally needs the full cycle; unplugging only the USB lead is often not enough.
3. Choose the printer again in the PRINT panel, since the old selection may now point at a queue that no longer exists.

If it happened shortly after installing other label software, that is worth mentioning when you report it — printer drivers from different applications can disturb one another's queues.

It forgets my printer, my folder, my window size

It is being run from the disk image rather than from Applications. Drag it to Applications, eject the disk image, and open it from there. See Getting started.

"macOS cannot verify this app is free from malware"

You should never see this: PR Labeller is signed and notarised by Apple, and opens in one step. If you do see it, the copy you have is damaged or is not one of ours — download it again rather than working around the warning.

The label prints in the wrong place

See if the printing sits off-centre.

Reporting a problem

Settings ▸ Diagnostics ▸ Send… opens a message to prlabeller@gmail.com with a technical summary already in it: versions, your printer and its driver, the label sizes the driver offered, and the alignment in use.

It contains no addresses, no contacts and nothing from your labels. Nothing is sent by the app — the report is on screen before you press the button and in the message afterwards, so you can read it, delete anything you would rather not send, and send it yourself. If this Mac has no mail account set up, the report goes to the clipboard instead and you can paste it wherever you like.

Say what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead. That sentence is usually worth more than everything underneath it.

7  What this is, and what it is not

PR Labeller is an independent program. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Sanford, L.P. or its subsidiaries. DYMO is their trademark, used here only to say plainly which files this program reads and which printers it prints to.

It contains none of their software. No templates, no stock catalogue, no driver files. Every label size you see is read from the driver already installed on your own Mac, every time the app runs, and the sample labels are generated from it too — which is also why they always match the stock you actually own.

The .label format is read and written by understanding the files, which are plain text and can be opened in any text editor. Nothing has been decompiled or taken apart.

8  The licence

Everything is unlocked during the beta, which runs until 1 March 2027. This is said here, and on the download page, before you install anything — discovered afterwards it would be a bait and switch; said up front it is simply the deal.

After that date the app does not stop and nothing you have made becomes unusable:

• Printing your existing labels goes on working, for ever, free. That is the job this was written to do, and it is not going behind a payment.
• Designing and editing labels, and printing a run from a list of contacts, become part of version 1.0.
• The free tier keeps printing up to five copies at a time.

There is no activation, no account and no server. Nothing here phones anywhere, and nothing stops working because a website went away.

9  Keyboard shortcuts