Print at Home

I recently had to design our print at home ticket documents. Read this and save time. You're welcome in advance.
Print at home ticket design Basics:

• Use ctrl+x to remove a field
• If you put html in a free-text field, be sure to include the / at the end of image, br, or other tags e.g. <br /> instead of <br >.
• Always use PDF format! When html is emailed to gmail, alo, etc, the ticket gets completely destroyed! Try it, its kind of funny to see.
• always test whenever you make a change, to make sure you don't get the 'print at home error', which really could mean anything, so keep track of your changes too.
• use the export utility to backup functional ticket designs (or use the document copy feature)

Date format:
To format dates in the doc designer:

• Day name: ddd
• day number: dd or d for 03 or 3
• Month name: mmm (like Aug , Sep, Nov)
• Month Number: mm
• Year: yy or yyyy for 09 or 2009
• Hour: h or hh for 7 or 07
• minute: mm
• AM / PM: ampm

So for example you want the format
Sun Aug 3 2008 7:00 PM
use
ddd mmm d yyyy h:mm ampm
and enter this in the 'format' field when you have the event date highlighted.

Layering Images and Text:

I could not get text to appear on top of an image. the designer makes it look like you can control what appears on top of what if you have 2 fields overlapping. It appears to save the info, but when the designer is closed and re-opened, it does not save the change. In addition, i did not see a place in the database to store any ordinal information. I tried to get around this using transparent images - but - when printed from firefox, text underneath a transparent image does not show on the printed page.

Concatenating Fields:

You can concatenate fields by using
concat(@FirstName,' ',@LastName)
or concat(@fieldname1,'anytext',@fieldname2)

Barcodes:

I had the barcode width set to 300, the pah barcode width set to 300 as well, but the image still measured in at 200 pixels. If anyone figures out how to get a bigger barcode, kudos and let me know. for now, 200 pixels seems to work fine and scans fine when printed.