Themes, settings and help in Labels by Zaweba

Labels by Zaweba keeps very little in the way of settings, and what it keeps is there to save you repeating yourself. It remembers a light or dark theme, where you left the window, your recent designs, your saved return address and the calibration offset for each printer you have set up. There is no account, and nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose Send feedback.

Knowing what is remembered helps you trust it. Set something up once and it is there next time.

Light and dark themes

Choose a light or dark theme to suit your screen and your room. Dark is easier on the eyes in the evening, which is often when Christmas card labels get done. Light can make it easier to judge how a design will look on white label stock. The theme changes the app around the designer, not the labels you print.

What Labels remembers for you

The window position is remembered, so Labels opens where you had it.

Recent designs are listed, so the return address label you print every few months or the product label you reuse every week is a click away rather than a search through folders. Designs are .ozl files you can save anywhere, and the recent list simply points you back to them.

Your return address is saved too. When you print envelopes with a return address top left, you don't have to type it each time.

Most valuable of all are the calibration offsets. Print > Calibrate a printer prints a calibration page; you measure where the cross landed and Labels works out the offset that corrects it. That offset is saved for that printer and applied to everything printed on it from then on. If you have two printers, each keeps its own.

The Help menu

The Help menu gathers the practical things in one place. Send feedback and Report a problem let you tell the makers what works and what doesn't. Check for updates sees whether there is a newer version. Other Zaweba apps points you to the rest of the family. Two of them are already inside Labels, because the creators from QR by Zaweba and Barcode by Zaweba sit on the Insert menu, and Write by Zaweba can read the Labels address book to make one letter per contact. The licence agreement is there too; it is shown once when you first start the app and stays available in Help afterwards.

Privacy by design

Labels is free software under the EULA, works offline and has no account. Your contacts are kept in a local file on your PC. Nothing is uploaded, synced or shared unless you choose to send feedback. For a program that holds names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, that is a sensible default, especially for clubs and small businesses holding other people's details.

Because everything is local, backups are your responsibility. CSV export writes the address book, or one group, to a file you can keep elsewhere, and saving designs somewhere backed up keeps them safe as well.

Keeping your settings working for you

Don't skip calibration because the setting seems fiddly. It takes a few minutes once per printer and saves sheets for years.

If you change printers, run calibration again for the new one. Offsets are per printer, so the old one's figures won't carry over, and that is deliberate.

And if you move to a new computer, remember that settings live with the app on the old one. Export your contacts as CSV, copy your .ozl designs, and you will be back to normal quickly. The few settings, such as the theme and return address, take moments to set again.