Label sizes - help needed

As part of the 'make things easier for new users' work on printing stuff, I have come to drug labels.  After much googling I have come to the conclusion that we should provide drug label templates for the following:

30258 Diskette 54x70mm   2 1/8 x 2 3/4 inch

30321 Large Address 36x89mm   1 4/10 x 3 1/2 inch

 

The 1.8 release contains a 1 8/10 x 3 inch label template for use in the US - but I cannot find (on Office Depot or Staples) a label of this size. Can a US/canadian person provide input please.

I would much appreciate feedback on what label sizes we should support in the 1.9 release.

Note that I intend to move away from the current characterisation of Dymo and Epson labels and instead just use a 'size name' - ie Diskette or 'Large Address', because a) Dymo machines can use both the above sizes; b) Epson don't appear to now make adhesive label printers; c) Seiko do

Regards, Tim G

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Re: Label sizes - help needed

Hi Tim G,

Good luck with simplifying printer implentation!

Physical label sizes:

54x70 (from an online cheap supplier)

 

According to our printer settings we use:

a) SLP-1RL,-2RL Adr sm(28x89mm) (Using a IPP and a linux based CUPS print server and a Seiko 660 SLP)

(There is a great story behind this CUPS print server... for the geeky minded)

b) SLP-DRL Diskette (54x70mm) (Using a Seiko 440 driver set)

 

Our label template dimensions are 204 x 150 within Ireport

 

Hope this is some use.

Cheers,

Matt C

Re: Label sizes - help needed

Thanks Matt. Diskette (54x70mm) seems fairly common - we use it in Hong Kong with Dymo LabelWriters, and I know AVC use it with Seiko Label Printers.

Regards, Tim G

 

Re: Label sizes - help needed

Tim,

We've been using Dymo 102mm x 54mm (4" x 2-1/8") with limited success on a Dymo printer.  I've never been able to get full-width use of it... not that it is real important as the usable width (52mm out of 102mm) fits on our small bottles.

Using CUPS and Dymo's CUPS Driver, I've never been able to get any more printable width, no matter how I tweak the template.  Another 10mm of usable space would be nice though.

Sam

Re: Label sizes - help needed

Sam - thanks for this. As regards usable width, I suspect that there are some built in limits.  I grabbed the Seiko Label maker software and its label creator will not let you get closer than about 3mm from the edges. On the sample Dymo label I have here from Hong Kong, the left margin (print starts at) is 5mm and the right is 2mm.

I will initially use a 3mm  margin on the templates and then see if I can get people to try them.

I will add 30323 Shipping 54x101mm  2 1/8 x 4 inch into the set.

Regards, Tim G

Labels - 1.9 samples

### Revised 3Aug for no logo, bigger font in footer and to drop 'Address Large' size as only space for 2 text lines.

Attached are 3 pdfs containing sample labels that the 1.9 templates will generate (courtesy of the new letterhead facility). These are for the three sizes:

  • 30258 Diskette 54x70mm   2 1/8 x 2 3/4 inch
  • 30323 Shipping 54x101mm  2 1/8 x 4 inch
  • 30326 Video Top 46x79mm   1 4/5 x 3 1/10 inch

In all 3 cases I have deliberately forced overflow by inserting too many label text lines.

Note that these:

  1. show dd/mm/yy dates (if used in the US/Canadian locale they will switch to mm/dd/yy)
  2. Show Mr ZZtest's dog ZZ-Dog - ie the patient format is <pet-name> <owner-lastName> (#pet_id)
  3. are designed for plain stationary
  4. use the new 1.9 'medium' name format for the clinician's name

The diskette one looks like:

The shipping one looks like:

and the Video Top one like:

I would appreciate it if someone would try printing these to their label printer and telling me whether they fit/appear correct.

Finally any comments/feedback on the label layout & contents would be appreciated. If you want you can reach me off forum via tim dot gething at bigpond dot com  However, remember that we are not trying the generate the most sexy label for your practice - but rather something that is useful to a new OpenVPMS user and requires no customisation of the template jrxml.

Regards, Tim G

 

AttachmentSize
Drug Label-Video Top.pdf 2.71 KB
Drug Label-Shipping.pdf 2.62 KB
Drug Label-Diskette.pdf 2.7 KB

Re: Labels - 1.9 samples

Hi Tim...

Great addition!

Took me a while to get it the Drug Label-Shipping pdf printed as I was having problems getting it rotated properly for our Dymo printer.  Not quite sure where our issue is, since once I loaded it into LibreOffice, I had no trouble printing it from there.  Should be using the same CUPS driver as the rest of our print utilities so not sure what's up.

Anyway, looks good except for two small issues:

1) Left and right margins need to be increased a few mm as our Dymo Labelwriter 450 clips between the D and a in Dantrium on the left and before the L in ANIMAL on the right. Anything past there is unprintable area.

2) The logo doesn't really print on this black and white thermal printer... just a dithered smudge.

So how do the label lines work?  Does it just take the text from the edit label box and wrap it onto the label (preferred) or will their instead be a provision for putting text into lines 1-8.

Sam

 

Re: Labels - 1.9 samples

Sam - thanks for this.  I will pull in the left and right margins a bit and email you the new version.

logo: I was tossing up whether to include this - I did so a) to individualise the label; b) to duplicate the Hong Kong label (which has a pre-print dual language Animal Use Only at the top and logo and address at the bottom). However since one wants to minimise the space used, the logo ends up pretty small and does not look good.  I suspect that I should remove it.

label text lines: these just come from the label text itself - I used the following for testing: (this is from ZZ-Dog's medical record)

To cover the case of "I just want a label to stick on this patient's hospital cage", the jrxml supports a product with a Printed Name of "LABEL-CSB". We have a medication product as follows:

and it generates a label as follows:

(this is using the Diskette sized label). As you can see the 'Animal Use Only' gets suppressed and the product name is replaced by the patient's Colour/Species/Breed (hence the CSB).

There are obviously other ways to do this sort of 'give me a non-drug label'. However, when I cloned the Hong Kong drug label, it seemed a neat feature to leave in.

Note that because you can do a New Medication on the Patients|Medical records screen, select this product, fill in the label text and print the label, and THEN cancel, you can generate a label and not leave an entry in the medical records - ie you can do

 

then press Print Label and get:

 

You then press Cancel on the New Medication screen, and you have a printed label with no entry in the medical record.

So - is this a useful enough feature to document - or just something that only those Hong Kong people would want to do?

Regards, Tim G

Re: Label sizes - help needed

NOTE - I have just revised the earlier post containing the PDFs of the labels to include the revised template that decrease the left and right margins as per Sam's feedback.  Sam - can you try the new one - thanks.

Regards, Tim G

Re: Label sizes - help needed

OK, I'll run it when I am back in the clinic tomorrow. If you are dropping the logo (which I think is a good idea), it may allow for a bit larger font for the clinic name and address, etc at the bottom.  I'll see what it looks like in the revised version and get back to you.

Sam

Re: Label sizes - help needed

Sam - at the moment I have a non-prompting parameter 'showLogo' that is by set to Boolean.TRUE - changing this toi Boolean.FALSE will suppress the logo.

BUT - this does not gain you height for the name, phone & address.

Regards, Tim G

Re: Label sizes - help needed

Hi,

1) I would not have a logo

2) Keep in mind that the text including the clinic name and address and phone number need to be large enough to be legible. Vet Board in NSW has pulled us up on this before and we had to increase the font size from what was defaulted.

Re: Label sizes - help needed

Hi,

1) I would not have a logo

2) Keep in mind that the text including the clinic name and address and phone number need to be large enough to be legible. Vet Board in NSW has pulled us up on this before and we had to increase the font size from what was defaulted.

Re: Label sizes - help needed

Hi,

1) I would not have a logo

2) Keep in mind that the text including the clinic name and address and phone number need to be large enough to be legible. Vet Board in NSW has pulled us up on this before and we had to increase the font size from what was defaulted.

Re: Label sizes - help needed

OK... the shipping label prints out well on our Dymo now.  I would also suggest dropping the logo and increasing the size of the Clinic information, even if that means sacrificing one of the text lines.

Looks good!

Sam

Re: Label sizes - help needed

Ok - http://www.openvpms.org/forum/label-sizes-help-needed#comment-10620 above now has the latest (and I hope final) versions.

Sam has been printing the Shipping one - if others could validate the Diskette and Video Top ones, it would be appreciated.

Regards, Tim G

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