Glass · Production
Cutting labels: one per pane, straight from the nest
Every shop labels its glass, and almost every shop does it with a marker pen while the panes are still on the table. It is ten or twenty minutes of copying numbers off a plan, and it is where the wrong size ends up on the wrong van. These come out of the nest the optimiser already solved, in the order the table cuts them, with the same piece codes as the plan.
No job to label yet
Labels are made from a solved nest, so there has to be one first. Put your cutting list into the optimiser and come back — or open a job somebody sent you as a link.
Open the cutting optimiser →What goes on the label, and why
The label exists for the moment nobody plans for: the panes are off the table, on a trolley, and the person moving them is not the person who cut them. At that point two panes 40 mm apart in size are the same pane, and the only way to tell them apart is to measure — which costs more than labelling ever did.
The piece code
A letter for the size and a number for which one it is, so B7 is the seventh pane of size B. It is the same code printed on the cutting plan diagram, which means a label and a rectangle on a drawing always mean the same pane. The letters I and O are skipped: on a workshop floor, under dust, they read as 1 and 0.
Rotated
If the nest turned a pane to make it fit, the label says so. On clear float it changes nothing. On coated, laminated, patterned or toughened-with-a-distortion-direction glass it changes which face goes outward, and finding out at the installation is expensive. It is printed as a mark rather than a word so it survives being read quickly.
Which sheet it came from
Useful twice. It groups panes that were cut together, which is usually how they are stacked; and if a pane breaks, it says which sheet to go back to, and whether there is enough left on it to recut without opening a new one.
Printing them
The large and medium layouts are plain A4 with a dashed line to cut along — no special paper, two columns of 95 mm inside a 10 mm margin so an ordinary printer can reach the edges.
The small layout is 70 × 37 mm, three across and eight down: the 24-per-sheet adhesive label sold across Europe. That format has no gaps and no margins — three columns of 70 mm are exactly the 210 mm width of the paper — so the page is set to print with no margin at all and the dashed cut lines are dropped, because there is nothing to cut and the line would show on the edge of every label.
Print at 100%, with scaling turned off. A printer set to "fit to page" shrinks everything by a few per cent, which is invisible on the first label and half a label out by the bottom of the sheet. That single setting is the usual reason label printing "does not work".