the participation certificates

Tue, Jul 3 2007

A friend of my wife is a teacher at AJ Charbonneau Public School (Grades k-8 in Canada) in Arnprior, ON. She brought her running club into Ottawa to participate in a 10km run there, not bad for students in grades 5-8. She remembered that I had done certifcates for a fun run we organize at our home and asked if I could make certificates for the club. I've seen how well certificates go over with these and personaly believe that this participation demands positive reinforcement, so I launched DRAW.

Laying Out the Master Certificate

The first thing I did was layout a letter sized certificate. I chose portrait simply because the nicest certificates I've ever received were portrait. I plan on using Print Merge later, but I can't recall how that's done, so as is my tendency, I'll do that last :-)

To create a border, I double clicked the rectangle tool

from the toolbar on the left. This creates a rectangle on the border of the page. I copied and pasted that rectangle to create a second one, then I used the property bar to set the width and height of the second one 1/2 an inch smaller in each dimension.

To make this into a border, I typed Ctrl-A to select all and then Ctrl-L to combine the two into one object with a hole in the middle. I filled it black, I'll figure the colors out later if I don't like them.

I placed the text that the I figure the kids (and their parents) would want to see, name, date, name of the race and time. I added a little story about the running club and the event. Then I colored red the things I'd like merged in from a text file. I centered the text horizontally on the page by choosing the Arrange>Align and Distribute menu and selecting Center to Page Horizontally.

I know every school I know has a crest, so I grabbed the school crest off the web site. I also grabbed a graphic from the event web site for the top of the certificate. I corrected my initial guesses at numbers and fixed the story.

Merging the Data

Now it's time to merge in the data...the data copied and pasted from an email had text randomly spaced.

Using Find and Replace in the text editor, I replaced 2 spaces with 1 space and repeated that until there were no more instances of 2 spaces. I now have all data separated by a space. I then and replaced each space with a comma. I ended up with a list of firstname,lastname,time,category. I found after some trial and error that DRAW assumes the first record/line contains the field names as the first line of text. So I added that line;

Back to DRAW. I selected File Menu>Print Merge and chose to Create/Load Merge Fields. Then I chose to load the data file from above and clicked Next in the wizard.

The merge fields were accurate so I clicked next.

I saved my data settings. I found that in order to save I had to do more than just type a file name. I had to browse to a folder and then type a name. I consider that a bug. After I finished with the wizard the Print Merge toolbar showed up.

I clicked the 'Insert Merge Field' button

and placed each of the 3 fields into the layout by clicking the page. Then I deleted the placeholder text I had created earlier. I then tweaked colors and re-aligned the layout. Making sure the first and last names were center aligned was tricky. With the names in two fields, centering the names on the same line wasn' possible. I had to break them into separate lines and center then horizontally. I could have tweaked the data file so that the first and last names became a single field. I'll do that next time :-)

I sent the file off for review.

Print

Now to print! File>Print Merge>Perform Merge. I acknowledged that I wanted to automatically match the printer orientation with the layout orientation.

The Preflight tab of the Print dialog showed an error, I checked it out;

I realized I was printing to a laser printer that cannot print to the edge of the page. The outer black frame was therefore outside of the printable area. I selected the Layout tab and selected Fit to Page, the Preflight warning disappeared.

I re-checked spelling; this is exactly the wrong time to check for spelling. I figured the next worse time was after the kids got them :-) The prints look good.

and they were much appreciated.

cheers,

Adam