A:  The program interfaces with the Windows Printer object - which in turn communicates with the chosen Printer Driver - so any Windows printers should work (providing the manufacturer's printer driver is well written), but they've got to be able to print weather/waterproof labels, so an inkjet's ruled out straight away (the inks are water soluble). For stick-in labels, Laser Printers are OK, but the labels are quite expensive, which leaves Dot Matrix and Thermal Printers. Thermal Printers are excellent, as they fuse the ink onto plastic labels, but are expensive to buy (about £700). The labels are about £25/1000. Dot Matrix are good starter printers, but the ink ribbons tend NOT to be too UV resistant, so they fade after about a year. Dot matrix printers are therefore most new nurseries' choice. Most people move on to a thermal printer as soon as they can afford and/or justify one as the business expands. We use a TEC B452 thermal printer for our labels, because they're exceptionally fade resistant - some of our labels have been out on the nursery for 3 years or more and are still perfectly clear and legible.

A:  Plant labels come in 2 formats - Wide Edge Leading (WEL) and Narrow Edge Leading (NEL). NEL labels are arranged on the roll 4 or 5 labels wide (so you print the 4 or 5 labels coming out of the printer simultaneously), whereas the more usual WEL labels are printed one at a time, sideways, as they come out of the printer - as shown on photo below, with our WEL 115mm x 25mm labels.

A:   To create a shopping cart, you'll need to obtain a (free) PayPal account, which will enable you to receive payments from your customers over the internet. You can do this at the PayPal site (www.PayPal.co.uk or www.PayPal.com).
Once you have the account open, you'll need to set Plants for Windows up with your PayPal account details:
Start Plants for Windows and click the Edit Menu, then choose "Edit PayPal details" and enter the PayPal details.
Note that the "Enable PayPal Cart for Web Pages" is ticked to enable the cart feature. If it's unticked, the web page will be a standard online catalogue with no cart.
The currency code GBP stands for our UK currency. If you want to sell in a different currency, other codes, such as USD for US Dollars, are available on the PayPal site.
Now produce the web page by choosing the "Print" tab and choosing "Save List to File" with the "Save as HTML File" option, and click the "Plant List" button.
That's all there is to it!
Now simply transfer the file to your web site, using what's called "File Transfer Protocol", or FTP for short. Don't worry, either of the applications in the "TOOLS" folder on the CD will do this for you, without you needing to know much about it!

A:  Getting the Printer settings right for labels really is the most frustrating part of any label printing process, unless you have reliable optical label edge detection on the printer itself. All printers have a page size that Windows uses to set data up before sending it to the printer device (software which is part of Windows) which sends the data on to the printer driver (software written & supplied by the printer manufacturer), which passes the data on to the physical printer.
I set the printer up (e.g. Start/Settings/Printers/Printer Name/Properties/Paper/ - it varies from printer to printer) to have a custom "page" size which is a multiple of the width of the labels - e.g. if the labels are 25.4mm wide, I'd set the printer "page" length to be 127mm (of course, the printer page settings are usually in those very convenient units of 0.1mm :), so that makes it a setting of 1270) This means that every time the printer prints 5 labels, it should move itself to the start of the 6th label automatically by doing a page feed. In practice, for 25.4mm labels, I've found that the perforations etc make 5 labels slightly longer than 1270 - I need to set it somewhere between 1272 and 1275, depending on the label manufacturer. It's a bit of trial and error.
Why multiple labels? Well, if you set the "page" size to be one label width long, i.e. 254, your granularity is +/- 0.1mm per label; if you set it a 5 labels, your granularity is +/- 0.02mm per label - so it gives you better control.

Next thing is to set the actual label size up in Plants for Windows. What we're really doing here is printing 5 labels on one "page" of the printer (as we've now set the page up as 5 labels long). Again, the perforations affect the "true" label width - try 25.45 to start with. If you set this figure too long, it will print 4 labels and then find it can't fit the fifth label on the "page" and it will force a page throw - this will appear to you as a blank label after every 4 printed ones. If you set it too small, all the labels will fit on the "page", but the text alignment will appear to creep backwards, i.e. the fifth label's first line will be printing on the end of the fourth label. This can be alleviated to some extent by allowing a label separation of 0.1 or 0.2mm - set in the program Print settings tab - which allows for a tiny amount of "creep".

This amount of fiddling is inevitable, since the computer is "blind" to the real location of perforations, and all we can do is give the program as accurate an idea as possible of where those perforations are.
Because the measurements are merely accurate approximations, slight drift can occur on longer runs, which will result in ruined labels. To start with, I'd suggest batching the label runs in groups of 50 or so (e.g. 10 of plant#1, 22 of plant#2, 5 of plant#3, plus 2 each of plants #4-#7). As you hone the printer page and label size settings for your system, you can increase the run size.

A:   Some users have reported seeing a message like
COULD NOT COPY FILE: C:\DOWNLO~1\PLANTS3\VER.DL_-> C:\WINDOWS\VER.DL_

or

COULD NOT COPY FILE: C:\DOWNLOAD\SETUP1.EX__-> C:\WINDOWS\SETUP1.EXE

This problem sometimes occurs with the "SETUP.EXE", "VER.DLL" or "SETUP1.EXE" file, when something else has installed the file (e.g. VER.DLL) into your C:\WINDOWS directory and left it as "READ ONLY". Try deleting the file in question from your C:\WINDOWS directory (or renaming/moving it if you want to play safe) and try again. If you can't delete it, right click on it (from explorer), choose properties and un-check "SYSTEM", "HIDDEN" and "READ ONLY" then try again. The other thing that can cause this that the file in question is in use by your system, so the installation can't copy it to the right place. Make sure no other programs are running when you try to install software (any software, not just Plants for Windows!).