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Print at home ticket design 101

James Herberson
$organization

Hey all,

I haven't searched extensively on this so forgive me if this topic has been covered, but I'm wondering if there's a FAQ or a thread already where people are sharing their dos/don'ts or gotchas with the PAH setup.

If not, I'd like to see some of your ticket designs and hear about some of your experiences.  I've got the service running in our test environment and it's time to put together a sensible ticket design.

Thanks for all your help,
Jim

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  • Former Member
    Former Member $organization
    One recommendation I forgot to mention, is that I strongly encourage you to have copies of all ticket orders (configured in the "E-ticketServerServiceLive" config file) sent to another mailbox/email address where they can be stored and accessed in case patrons encounter trouble.  Someone at a conference session in San Antonio made that recommendation, and I am glad that I wrote it down.  It has been very useful to us already.  Out of 41 orders, we have probably had 5 customers call back and report that they did not get the file or had trouble printing it.  I have copies of our orders going to my help desk address/mailbox in Outlook.  I then set a rule to redirect all those messages with the PAH subject line into another mail subfolder that I call "Live PAH orders."  I then also created a public folder in Outlook, called "PAH Orders", which all box office staff can access ("Reviewer" permissions on the folder), and I copy the orders from my "Live PAH orders" subfolder into the "PAH Orders" public folder.  Thus, we have two backups of all PAH orders.  As the performances occur, I can then archive old PAH orders so that the mail folders do not grow too large.
     
    Another thing to mention is to be aware of the size of the pdf ticket file that gets created.  Originally we had a very large graphic on our pdf template design, which then caused the pdf ticket file to be more than 1MB in size (for each ticket).  Since some ISPs place a limit on the incoming email size, we were concerned that the large file might not be delivered to customers' email folders.  We were able to reduce the graphic to a much smaller size, and now each ticket file size is about 400KB.  We had one person order 10 tickets and I believe the file size ended up being 4MB.
     
    Hope this helps.
     

    acerpPenny Tabor
    IT Manager
    Midland Center for the Arts
    Midland, MI 48640


    From: Tessitura Technical Forum [mailto:forums-technical@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of James Herberson
    Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 1:37 PM
    To: Tabor, Penny
    Subject: [Tessitura Technical Forum] Print at home ticket design 101

    Hey all,

    I haven't searched extensively on this so forgive me if this topic has been covered, but I'm wondering if there's a FAQ or a thread already where people are sharing their dos/don'ts or gotchas with the PAH setup.

    If not, I'd like to see some of your ticket designs and hear about some of your experiences.  I've got the service running in our test environment and it's time to put together a sensible ticket design.

    Thanks for all your help,
    Jim




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  • $organization in reply to Former Member

    Thanks, Penny.  I have set up a bcc to our ticketoffice to be able to help those customers who have problems already as I'd heard that at conference as well.

    Would you be willing to share your ticket design?  I'd like to see more examples and see what most people are doing...overall layout, disclaimer language, etc...

    Thanks for the advice!

    /Jim

  • $organization in reply to James Herberson

    Here is an example of our Print at Home ticket design.

     

  • $organization in reply to Christian Mauri

    Thanks for posting the sample...we too are just in the design phase. I would love to see what everyone out there is doing for their PAHT. It seems there are a LOT of different concepts out ther as to what the tickets should look like.

     

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  • $organization in reply to Jen Skelly

    We've had PAHT running in our Test environment for a while, but have only recently finalized our template.  We had a recommendation to keep the PDF size under 100k, and we've managed to get it just under 90k, although we have no large images.  We had a bit of a problem with that at one point, but you can see significant changes in file size depending on how you import images into Acrobat.  I don't do design work, so I'm afraid I don't know the details.

    One other design recommendation was to place the bar codes in such a way that they would not be in the crease should the customer fold the page in a typical way (i.e. quarters or thirds).

    We also intend to run a soft launch shortly.  I'll see about posting an example then.