Troubleshooting
Fix blocks, wrong accents, vanishing fonts and clipped or mis-sized text.
ZPL Font Not Printing or Showing Blocks
Fix a ZPL font that prints blank, falls back to the default font, or shows squares and blocks instead of characters.
OpenSpecial Characters or Accents Printing Wrong in ZPL
Why accents, symbols and non-English characters print as the wrong characters on a Zebra printer, and how to fix the encoding mismatch.
OpenFont Disappears After Printer Reboot
Why a downloaded ZPL font is gone after power-off or reset, and how to make it persistent.
OpenZPL Text Cut Off or Wrong Size
Fix text that is clipped at the label edge, too small, too large, or a different size than expected in ZPL.
OpenHow to use these guides
Font problems fall into a small number of patterns, and each has a page here. Find the one that matches what you see, not what you suspect. If you get squares where letters should be, start with font not printing or showing blocks. If letters appear but they're the wrong ones, go to special characters printing wrong. A font that works until the printer is switched off is covered in font disappears after reboot. And text that runs off the label or comes out at the wrong size has its own page, text cut off or wrong size.
A method that works on any problem
Change one thing at a time. It's tempting to try five fixes at once, but if the problem disappears you won't know why, and if it doesn't you can't tell which change made it worse. Begin with the cheapest checks: read the ZPL for typos, paste it into the live preview, and print the printer's configuration and directory. Only then start suspecting the font or the hardware.
Strip the label down to one field in one font with plain text. If that works, add features back until it breaks, and you've found the cause. It feels slow, but it's usually the quickest route. The article on testing ZPL labels without wasting media describes a full routine.
The three questions behind most problems
First, is the font on the printer, and in the place you named? Second, does the printer read your bytes the way you intended? Third, does the font contain the characters you asked for? Answer those and you'll solve most cases. The fuller explanations are in flash versus RAM and Unicode and code pages.
Longer walk-throughs
Our blog has detailed articles for the most common headaches. Zebra printer printing boxes instead of text goes through every cause. The UTF-8 checklist follows the path your text takes from file to label. And if text is clipped, wrapping text with ^FB may be the fix you need.
If all else fails
You can sidestep fonts altogether by turning the text into a picture with the text-to-graphic converter. It's not elegant, but it prints exactly what you see on screen. And if you've found something we haven't covered, tell us, since the best guides come from real problems.