The Ticket Design Tool - How to Create a New Ticket Design

The Ticket Design Tool is used to create and edit your Ticket Designs in Spektrix.

In this article, we'll cover everything from how to create a brand new Ticket Design, setting your document properties and using conditional logic, all the way to printing your test tickets.

Your Ticket Design will be used if you ever want to print physical tickets for events at your venue. It’s also used to generate PDF / Print at Home / E-tickets.

TIP: Read our guide on how to set up Print at Home / E-tickets to find out more about how Ticket Designs work for Print at Home Tickets.

Ticket Designs in Spektrix

Your Ticket Designs can be found in Admin > Document Designs.

The options you’ll see are:

Ticket Design: designs for both printed tickets and the ticket portion of your Print at Home tickets/e-tickets
Merchandise: edit Ticket Designs for merchandise items
Other: here you can edit your Cover Page (used for Order summaries) and Address Label designs (used for printing postal information).
Gifts: here you can edit your Gift Voucher designs

TIP: To edit Card and Chip and Pin Receipts, get in touch with our Support Team who can make these changes for you.

Creating a new Ticket Design

In Admin > Document Designs > Tickets, you'll see a list of all your existing Ticket Designs.

You can choose to:

Edit one of these existing designs
Copy an existing design and edit it; or
Add a new Ticket Design

Setting your document properties

Click the Add button to launch the Ticket Design Tool.

You should see this screen:

First, you’ll need to set the size and orientation of your document. Go to Document Properties and fill out the following information:

Name: give your Ticket Design a clear, descriptive name.
Description: though this field is optional, we'd recommend completing it to make it clear what this Ticket Design is for.
Orientation: here you can choose between Landscape and Reverse Landscape. Reverse Landscape will rotate your Ticket Design by 180 degrees.
Width/Height (mm): set the size of your Ticket Design in millimetres based on the size of your ticket stock.
Printing Mode: here you can choose between three modes of printing:

Generic: this option will use the Windows drivers for the printer. In this mode, Spektrix will list a choice of standard fonts. To use a custom font, contact the Support team with the name of the font and the font file (.ttf) for them to add it to your system. If using a custom font, you will also need to make sure the font is installed on any computer with a printer attached.

WARNING: custom fonts cannot be used for tickets that are designed to be part of a Print at Home Ticket/E-ticket design.

FGL Basic or FGL Extended: these options can only be used with BOCA printers, or some Stimare printers that have a BOCA emulation mode. FGL Ticket Designs will be limited to the fonts stored on your BOCA printers.

Show/Snap to Grid: ticking Show Grid allows you to display a grid whilst working on your design. If you tick this check box, you'll also have the option to tick Snap to Grid, which snaps elements of your design to the grid for easier alignment.
Snap to Guides: tick this to snap elements of your design to guidelines for easier alignment. You can create guidelines on your Ticket Design by clicking and dragging from the horizontal and vertical rulers.

Watch this video to see how to add guidelines to your Ticket Design template:

Designing your ticket

The design area has a vertical and horizontal ruler in millimetres. You can use this to place elements onto the Ticket Design in specific places. Ticket Designs use dynamic content which will populate with the specific information related to each Ticket printed.

In order to make a change to any element of the design, you'll need to click on it to highlight it in green.

Within the Ticket Design Tool, example information is presented on the template where Text Fields using dynamic content will populate specific information about each Ticket printed.

In the top left-hand side of the editor, you can Copy and subsequently Paste a highlighted element of your design. You can also Delete a highlighted element, and use the Undo and Redo buttons as required.

TIP: Use the + and - buttons to zoom in and out of the Ticket Design.

Watch this video to see where to find the basic functions in the Ticket Design Tool such as font size, copy, paste, and zoom.

Adding text fields to your tickets

To add information to your tickets, you'll need to click the Text Fields button and drag items from the pop-up.

Text fields are pieces of dynamic content which will populate with the specific information related to each Ticket printed. Within the Ticket Design Tool, example information is presented on the template.

Within the pop-up, these fields are broken down into categories:

Each section lists the standard Spektrix fields at the top, like Order, Customer numbers, prices an seat information. Then, any related custom Attributes that you have on your system.

To place a field on your design, simply drag and drop it from this list on to your Ticket Design.

Once you've placed a field on your design, click it to highlight it in green. When it is highlighted, you can use the formatting controls in the top right-hand side of the editor to change the font, size, and weight of the text, or to rotate the field:

Adding text

Using the Text Editor, you can:

Add custom text to a system text field.
Join multiple fields together in one text box (rather than trying to line them up manually).
Add unconditional free text fields on your design.

When you open your Text Editor, you'll see Text Fields contained with curly brackets { }.

To add custom text to a system text field on your design, click it to highlight it, then click the Text Editor button; the editor will pop up and show the code for that field:

Adding custom text to fields

You can type custom text around the code which is contained within curly brackets.

For example, entering Printed on: {PrintingDate} would print as Printed on: 13/07/20.

Joining multiple fields together

If you want to join multiple fields together, you can click on other fields in order to see the code they use and then copy these tags into one Text Editor box.

For example, Customer Name: {Customer/FirstName} {Customer/LastName} - {Order/OrderId} would print as Customer Name: Sarah Patel - 14-JB-1234

Watch this video to see how to join two Text Fields together. In this example, using the {Customer/FirstName} and {Customer/LastName} Text Fields.

Customise date and time format

To customise the way that dates and times are printed on the tickets, add your preferred format at the end of the code. Do this after a colon and within the curly brackets.

For example, {EventInstance/Start:dddd dd MMMM yyyy} at {EventInstance/Start: HH:mm} would print as Saturday 18 July 2020 at 19:00

REMINDER: Codes used in the Ticket Design Tool are case sensitive.

For dates:
- Use d to print the date number in one figure where possible, e.g. 4 for the fourth day of the month or 25 for the twenty-fifth day
- Use dd to print the figure always in two figures, e.g. 04 for the fourth day of the month
For days of the week:
- Use ddd for short days, e.g. Mon, Tues
- Use dddd for the full day, e.g. Monday, Tuesday }
For months:
- Use M for the number of the month, e.g. 2
- Use MM for a two figure number, e.g. 02
- Use MMM for the three letter text version, e.g. Feb
- Use MMMM for the full word, e.g. February
For years:
- Use yy for the last two digits of the year, e.g. 23
- Use yyyy for the full year, e.g. 2023
For times:
- Use h or hh for the hour in the 12-hour clock, e.g. 3 or 03
- Use HH for the 24-hour clock, e.g. 15
- Use mm for minutes
- Use ss for seconds
- Use tt if you want to add AM or PM after the time

Upper and lowercase

To make a text field appear either in all lowercase or all uppercase letters, type :TOLOWER or :TOUPPER at the end of the code, after a colon and within the curly brackets.

For example, {Event/Name:TOUPPER} would print as NOUGHTS & CROSSES.

Unconditional free text

To add an unconditional free text field to your design, click the New Text button. Click this newly created field to highlight it, then click the Text Editor button to add the messaging you require.

Unconditional free text will always print the same free text on each Ticket. For example, entering the free text ‘the car park will close 30 minutes after the performance’.

Placing barcodes/QR codes

You can place a barcode and/or a QR code using the New Barcode and New QR Code buttons at the top of the editor. With these added, any tickets printed will have a barcode and/or QR code that visually represents their unique order number; this can then be scanned at the point of entry.

Just in case your Front of House team need to manually enter the order number into the Scanning Interface, you can add it below a barcode/QR code by selecting it then ticking the Show Label check box:

Here you can also convert an existing QR code to a barcode and vice versa by choosing the other option from the dropdown.

We recommend making your barcodes/QR codes as big as your ticket stock and/or Print at Home PDF allows in order to speed up scanning. To do this, select the barcode/QR code and drag one of its corners to resize it.

You may also wish to have one horizontal and one vertical barcode, just in case of any printing problems.

TIP: QR codes can be printed on Print at Home tickets/e-tickets, but we find that normal barcodes are more reliable on standard tickets. BOCA printers are generally unable to print QR codes, with the exception of the BOCA Lemur which can print QR codes but only in Generic mode and not while using FGL. All Stimare printers have the ability to print QR Codes.

Watch this video to see how to add, place and resize QR codes and barcodes onto your Ticket Design.

Conditional logic in Ticket Designs

Using conditional logic on your Ticket Design allows you to show additional messaging depending on whether the ticket meets specific criteria.

Let's say you have a free text Order Attribute called Accessibility Needs where customers can input any relevant accessibility requirements they might have. If you add a text field with {Order/Attributes/Accessibility Needs} to your Ticket Design, the free text entered for this Order Attribute will be printed on the ticket.

Using conditional logic, you can add a custom text field based on any value having been entered into this field. Here we have added code that says IF any order attribute has any value in the field for Accessibility Needs then it will display the text: Patron has accessibility needs.

{IF:Order/Attributes/Accessibility Needs}Patron has accessibility needs.{END}

Further, if you add a text field with an IF and an ELSE condition this can provide an alternative in the event of the IF condition not being met. So, if the customer doesn’t have free text in the Accessibility Needs field, you can display alternative custom text.

{IF:Order/Attributes/Accessibility Needs}Patron has accessibility needs.{ELSE}Patron did not specify any accessibility needs.{END}

This will print Patron did not specify any accessibility needs if a value wasn't entered for this Order Attribute, and Patron has accessibility needs if a value was entered.

Our Support Team will be happy to help if you need more guidance on using conditional logic on Ticket Designs.

Checking and testing your Ticket Design

In order to ensure your design looks as you'd expect, you'll want to test print it before you start using it. The Print button at the top right of the editor allows you to run a test print from a connected printer.

To test your Print at Home ticket design, follow the steps laid out in the Print at Home Tickets / E-tickets guide.