Printing festival badges

Overview

This article describes how to use templates to create personal festival badges (or lanyards).

Audience

Exporting and printing badges is often done by users with a Guest service role, but an Administrator role is needed to create or edit the underlying templates.

Word merge template exports are available to festivals with a Premium Filmchief license.

Getting started

Make sure that you have software to create and save docx files, such as Microsoft Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs.

Get high-quality (300 dpi) versions of the badges from your designer, preferably as a png or jpg file. Note: Microsoft Word does not work well with CMYK images, so it's recommended to use RGB images.

Create a new document and start by setting the correct page size, to match the size of the badge. Or, if you have multiple badges per sheet, calculate the page size accordingly.

Using placeholders

Placeholders are text elements in your documents that are replaced with actual content. For instance, the text ${displayName} will be replaced by the full name of the guest.

To export multiple passes into a single document, we need to define the start and end of each badge. For this, use the following placeholders:

When exporting, all content between ${badge} and ${/badge} is repeated as many times as the number of accreditations you have selected for your export.

The following placeholders are supported:

Uploading your template

Go to Templates Word merge templates. Click on New to create a new Word merge template.

In the dialog that appears, you can define the Word merge template:

Once you have created a template, click Open to show its details page.

Testing your template

Open any list of accreditations, and select a few guests - preferably ones who have provided information that you want to appear on the badge, e.g. a picture, an organization and/or a function title.

Click on Export > Merge with template > Microsoft Word (.docx) and select the template that you created in the previous step.

Then click on the Export button and open the downloaded file to see the results.

Processing options

In the Options field, you can define additional settings to control the appearance of certain fields in your document.

User image

The ${userImage} placeholder is replaced with the profile picture of your guests. To control the exported size, various options can be defined:

QR code

The ${qrCode} placeholder is replaced with a unique QR code for each guest. To control the exported size and appearance, various options can be defined:

Example

Here's an example value for the Options field:

{
    "qrCode": {
        "targetWidth": 100,
        "targetHeight": 100,
        "options": {
            "addQuietZone": true,
            "quietzoneSize": 1,
            "imageTransparent": false,
            "fgColor": [
                255,
                0,
                0
            ],
            "bgColor": [
                224,
                224,
                224
            ],
        }
    },
    "userImage": {
        "scaleOptions": {
            "coverWidth": 100,
            "coverHeight": 100,
            "cropWidth": 100,
            "cropHeight": 100
        }
    }
}
		

In this example, exported QR codes are generated with specific dimensions and visual styling. The target width and height are both set to 1.00 inch, ensuring that the QR code images are square-shaped. The "addQuietZone" option is enabled, which adds a border around the QR code to separate it from surrounding content; the size of this quiet zone is specified to be 1 unit. The QR code background is opaque, as indicated by "imageTransparent" set to false. Additionally, the foreground color of the QR code, which typically consists of the patterned squares, is defined as red (RGB: 255, 0, 0), while the background color is a light grey (RGB: 224, 224, 224).

Pictures are resized to cover a 1.00 x 1.00 inch area, and then cropped to 1.00 x 1.00 inches, which results in square photos.