I worked with a customer yesterday who had a Zebra TLP 3842 printer to print individual labels. They recently upgraded from CR 9 to CR12 (2008) and with that upgrade they lost the ability to print labels correctly. After many attempts to isolate the problem we got down to this.

1) The preview in CR12 is correct, but the label contents print rotated 90 degrees. It seemed like an orientation problem but no changes to orientation settings had any effect. It is as if the printer is not hearing some of the instructions from CR12.

2) We experimented with all options in printer setup and in Crystal. No matter what settings we used we couldn’t prevent the rotation. This happened on two different PCs in the office (the only ones tried) and the printer driver seems to be the latest one available.

2) A brand new very simply report created in v9 (on the same PC) prints correctly. But that same report, when run in CR12 (on the same PC) prints rotated. MS Word also prints to this printer correctly.

3) If the v9 report is saved in CR12 it now prints rotated when run in v9. This seems to indicate that something stored in the RPT is confusing the printer.

So I am stumped. I am puzzled as to why it would work in v9, work in preview of CR2008 but then print wrong. If you run into a similar problem or if you use the same label printer successfully with CR12 I would like to hear from you. If you currently use this printer you might want to use the 30-day free trial to confirm that you can print your labels before you upgrade.