Zebra Printer – Wrong Characters Printing on Shipping Labels

Category: Printers  •  Label Problems  •  Status: Draft


What's happening: Some characters on your shipping labels are printing wrong. For example, a ) might print as a strange letter with an accent mark. This usually happens after the printer has been reset or gone through the setup wizard.


What Does This Look Like?

  • A few characters on the label look wrong — like strange symbols or letters with accent marks over them.
  • Most of the label prints fine — only certain characters are affected.
  • The problem started after the printer was reset, re-set up, or updated.

Why Is This Happening?

Your Zebra printer uses a setting called a character set (sometimes called a code page). This setting tells the printer how to read and print letters and symbols.

When the printer is reset or set up again, this setting can change to the wrong option. When that happens, the printer reads some characters differently and prints the wrong thing. The fix is to change the setting back to the correct one.


How to Fix It

Step 1 – Print a test page from the printer

Hold the Feed button on the printer for about 2 seconds until a page prints out. Look for a line that says Character Set and write down what it says.

Step 2 – Check if the setting is correct

The setting should say PC850. If it says something different (like UTF-8), that's the problem and it needs to be changed.

Step 3 – Fix the setting

Option A – Quick fix using a print command (easiest):

Send this command to the printer:

^XA^CI0^XZ

Option B – Change it through the printer menu:

  1. Go to Settings on the printer screen.
  2. Select Language, then Character Set.
  3. Change it to PC850 Multilingual.
  4. Save and exit.

Step 4 – Test it

Print a shipping label from Shipstore and check that everything looks correct.


Character Set Reference

Setting Code
Name
Notes
^CI0
PC850
✅ This is the correct setting for Shipstore
^CI13
Windows Latin 1
Wrong setting — may be selected by the setup wizard
^CI28
UTF-8
Wrong setting — may be set after a printer update

Questions to Ask the Customer

  • When you set the printer back up, did it ask you to pick a language or character set? What did you choose?
  • Did the printer get a software update around the time this started?
  • Does it happen on every label, or just some of them?
  • Are you printing straight from Shipstore, or through another program?

Still Not Working?

If the labels still look wrong after changing the character set, contact your Shipstore support team. There may be a setting inside Shipstore itself that is overriding the printer setting.


Shipstore.com Support Knowledge Base  •  Last Updated: March 2026  •  Status: Draft