One die, many SKUs

AlvaLabel ships a catalog of Avery, Avery Zweckform, HERMA, and TownStix sheets. Building it was less “type in the pack on the box” and more “find the punch, then find every SKU that uses it.” This post is how the dies were measured, why round labels are not packed edge to edge, and why search has to know that 8160 is 5160.

Summary

Problem. The number on the box is a pack. Avery 8160 (inkjet) and 5260 (Easy Peel) are the same US Letter address die as 5160. Zweckform L7160-40 and L7160-100 are the same A4 die as 7160-10, just more sheets. A designer that listed every SKU as its own format would drown the picker and still print on the wrong pitch if two packs shared a punch but we had copied dimensions from the wrong PDF. Manufacturer “templates” are also uneven: some publish cell size and forget the tab between columns; round sheets look like a tight grid until you measure the pitch and find several millimetres of waste.

Solution. One catalog row per die. Canonical number is the template (Avery) or the smallest pack (Zweckform, HERMA). Other pack SKUs are aliases for search and the “also …” line. Cell size and grid come from the brand’s own numbers. The tab — the gap between cells — is measured from official Word templates (or from TownStix’s published horizontal/vertical spacing), not guessed from a pack photo. Round stocks use pitch = diameter + tab, not pitch = diameter.

The lists on the site (Avery, Avery Zweckform, HERMA, TownStix) are that catalog: stock number, aliases, size, grid, and a thumb of the layout.

The picker is a die, not a shopping list

AlvaLabel’s “New label” pane is a tree: brand → type → stock. What you select is a punch. Printing 30 mm rounds on a 40 mm pitch because we “knew” they were four across is the failure mode. The raster, the print-start picker, and the red/green printer overlay all sit on the same millimetre grid. If the tab is wrong, every downstream view is wrong in the same way — which is at least consistent, and useless.

So each LabelStock is:

• manufacturer and stockNumber (canonical)
• aliases (other packs on the same die)
• kind (address, return, shipping, universal, round, file folder, full sheet)
• cell width × height, or diameter for circles
• columns × rows
• gapX / gapY when cells do not abut
• sheet A4 or US Letter

Zweckform and HERMA use the smallest sold pack as the canonical number (10 sheets if it exists, else 25/40, else 100). Avery US Letter uses the template number (5160, not 8160). Round Avery packs that share a punch are listed by diameter (Ø 2"), because the SKU list behind those circles is a mess of Presta and multi-packs.

Search matches the canonical number and every alias. Type 8160 and you get 5160, with the line also 8160 · 5260 · 8460. That is the pack on the shelf talking to the die in the app.

Where the millimetres come from

Cell size and the grid are the easy part: they are on the box and in the brand’s own tables. The tab is not.

Rows on the rectangular office sheets we carry abut — the vertical pitch is the cell height. Columns often do not. L7160 and HERMA 8632 have a strip between columns; Avery 5160 has a 1/8" gutter. Copying “70 × 36 mm, 3 × 8” and centering a tight 3×8 on A4 will look fine in a UI and print with the middle column sitting on the web.

We measured those gutters from official Word templates (and, where Word was silent, from Label Planet / TownStix pack diagrams). Method for a round sheet, which is the same idea:

1. Download the manufacturer’s blank Word template.
2. Print to PDF (so the page is a real A4/Letter, not a floating drawing).
3. In Inkscape or similar, measure centre-to-centre pitch of two adjacent circles.
4. Tab = pitch − diameter.

Zweckform L3415 is the textbook case: Ø 40 mm, 4 × 6, 6 mm tab. A catalog that packed forty-millimetre disks on a 40 mm pitch would be 6 mm off per gap, 18 mm off by the fourth column.

TownStix is the pleasant exception. townstix.com/templates lists Horizontal spacing and Vertical spacing on every template. That is the tab. No Inkscape step. Their A4 rounds (A4-Round-24 at 40 mm / 6 mm, A4-Round-12 at 60 mm / 7 mm) closed on the sheet when we rebuilt the grid from diameter + margins + spacing.

Avery US rounds do not share a single tab. Ø 2" is 0.625" horizontally and 0.583" vertically; Ø 2.5" is almost flush on Y (0.031"). Those numbers are from the Word templates, not from “circles on Letter, divide evenly.”

What we do not catalog

• TrueBlock, clear, neon, Presta SKUs as separate dies when they share a punch already in the list.
• TownStix US Letter (US-30 and friends) and cable wraps — V1 is A4 for that brand.
• User-defined formats. A later version can take sheet, cell, grid, and gaps from the user. Until then the picker is the measured catalog, not a CAD tool.

Full-sheet stocks (Avery 5165, Zweckform 6125, HERMA 8637) are still dies: 1 × 1, cell = page. They exist so a “print the whole page” job uses the same preview and the same printer-margin overlay as a 24-up.

Why this belongs next to the printer post

Hardware margins are a property of the device. Tabs are a property of the paper. Mixing them — treating a 2.5 mm column gutter as “close enough” because the Epson already eats 3 mm — is how you get a sheet that looks aligned in the driver preview and walks across the die. AlvaLabel keeps the two rectangles separate: stock grid first, then the printable wash on top. If both are honest, the red overlay means what it says.

The live catalogs are the same data the app ships. When a die changes, we re-export label_stocks.json for the site rather than hand-edit four language pages.