Adding Fields - Product Description

A Text field is used to display written information on a ticket, such as a product’s brand or description. When the template is used to create tickets, this field can have alphanumeric information loaded or typed in.

Action: Click ‘Text’ from the Add menu, under Data.

A new Text field should now appear with the words ‘Sample Text’ written in it. By clicking on this field we can make its properties menu appear and adjust how we want the text to be displayed within it.

Drag the field to where you want to position it on the ticket and drag the bounding box anchors to resize. Guidelines will appear while you do this to help place the field in the middle of the template.  You can also use the X and Y fields in the Properties menu to position it, and the W and H fields to resize it.

In this instance, we’ll be placing it over the blue area in the bottom portion of the template.

Action: Set the position of the Text field to X: 5.709mm and Y: 54mm. Enter W: 52mm and H: 24mm to resize it.

 Like the Image field, we must give this field a name.

Action: Type ‘Product Description’ as the Field name.

Now to set the font for the text that will be displayed. You can select the font’s family name, and where applicable, set it to regular, bold, italics, etc.

Action: Set the font to  ‘Open Sans Regular’.

Below the font name are the options for how the text will be aligned horizontally and positioned vertically.

Action: Set text to be ‘center aligned’ and positioned at the ‘Top’ of the Text field.

The last part is to set the font size. It can be set to one particular size and this will not change on the ticket no matter how much text is typed in. This is good for keeping a standardized font size across multiple tickets, however it can cause some words to be cut off if there is too much text to fit in the Text field.

You can instead set the text to scale to fit the field. This would cause text to shrink in order to fit all of it in, or scale up if not many letters are entered.

A good medium is to set the font size to scale but limit it to a maximum and minimum font size so that it doesn’t get too big or too small.

Remember: text must still be legible when printed so keep the size of the ticket in mind when setting these properties.

Action: Set the font size to ‘Scale to fit’ but with the Minimum font size limited to ‘6’ and the Maximum font size to ‘14’.

Finally, we will be setting the colour of the text. In this example, we will be using white text on a blue background to make it stand out. Please note: if you are printing on a pre-printed paper stock you cannot use white text.

Action: Set the Fill Colour option to ‘White’ by clicking on the coloured circle and selecting the appropriate colour swatch.

NEXT: Adding Fields - Price