BarTender Intelligent Template
Overview
As complex and variable designs become increasingly popular, so does the need for dynamic design techniques. BarTender’s ability to create Intelligent TemplatesTM enables companies to produce a wide variety of flexible label designs without the need to create and maintain hundreds of separate documents. This allows you to vary the image, color, object position and text on each item that you print.
There are a number of techniques available for creating a dynamic design:
Conditional Printing allows you to set”conditions that define when objects, layers or even entire templates will be printed.
Custom Visual Basic Scripts execute in response to certain document-level events.With VBScript, you can alter any object’s appearance by changing its color, font, position, size and/or border.
Auto-Sizing text and barcode objects forces the object to automatically fit a designated space on your template.
lSuppression automatically hides text on your template based on conditions you define.
Conditional printing allows you to define exactly when different objects, layers or templates in your document will print. For example, you can set a graphic to conditionally print under one condition, but not under any others. Or you can choose to print a template based on a value in your database. You can customize printing for as much or as little of your design as you want.
Conditional printing is based around conditional operators. For example, your conditions for printing might be based on whether the item contains or does not contain certain text, numeric values, or images, or whether the conditional item is less than, greater than, or equals a set value.
You can apply conditional printing to objects, layers or templates, depending on how much of your design you want to change at print-time.
Conditional printing is enabled from the When to Print dialog in BarTender. This lets you define a conditional statement based on a database field or named data source value to determine when the object, template or layer will print. For more information, refer to the following topics in the BarTender help system:
When your design changes only a single object between multiple items, you should consider setting up conditional printing for that one object. This lets you print (or not print) one object based on a condition that you define. Conditionally printing an object allows you to define specific conditions under which an object will appear on your printed item. This technique is useful when you need different objects to appear in variations of the same template.
Any object can be conditional to print when you want it to, including:
- Barcodes
- Encoderobjects
- Text objects
- Lineobjects
- Shapeobjects
- Pictures
