Batch Card Printing

What is Batch Card Printing? Batch card printing is a way of printing non-chip cards directly from your web browser. The only thing you need is a card printer connected to your computer, your NCDB and an up-to-date version of standard web browser. Batch card printing feature prints data for each card on one page of a .pdf file. From this .pdf file, you print data directly on your cards. Note that if your cards contain any kind of contactless chip, using Batch card printing isn’t good way for you. Batch card printing supports bardcodes (several types) and QR codes, into which you can encode your data.

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Adding next pages Using “Add Page” button at the very bottom, you can also add third, fourth, etc. page of your cards. However, adding pages is relevant only for virtual cards used within the mobile application created by GTS Alive. Only this application is able to display further pages. If you don’t use this application, only the first and second page is relevant for you.

Adding placeholders For each page of your design, a set of buttons for adding placeholders is present. These are “Add Text”, “Add Image” and “Add Barcode”. When choosing any of them, new placeholder is added into your design. Note the “Properties” window on the right side, where you can define specific properties of your placeholder.

TEXT For text placeholder, you can choose several values that will be displayed as content of the placeholder when the card is printed. Names of the values are self-explanatory. The only value that can lead to confusion is “CUSTOM”. This is designed to display values stored in custom fields (see further).

Position – you can define the position of the placeholder manually, just using drag&drop, but you can also define it more precisely using the offset (in milimeters) from Left and Top of the design borders.

Font Size – you can adjust the size of text within specified placeholder using 0,1 step. Default size is 3.

Font Color – black, white and grey text color are available

Alignment – text alignment according to the placeholder

Rotation – text rotation. Please make sure your design meets ISO standards before you overuse rotation.

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Custom fields are special type for optional data that can be defined differently to fit needs of every card issuer. Through custom fields, basically any value or more values can be attached to a specific card holder or card. This can be for example name of study course, student ID, blood group, card serie etc. Custom fields should reflect the “real world” – information that are tied to a person should be bound to cardholders, whereas information tied to card should be defined as card bound. Values for custom fields can be added using the API for external issuers (most recommended way for External Issuers), or manually in edit mode of cardholders/cards.

How to define new custom fields? Custom fields can be defined in NCDB -> Cards Issuers -> Custom Fields

When creating a new custom field, several things need to be defined:

Field Name – use some self explanatory name
Field key – this key is used as the identifier in the API request or in batch card printing
Bound to Card or Bound to Card Holder. This means to which entity the custom field is assigned.
Active – without selecting this checkbox, the custom field can’t be used
Optional – custom fields can be mandatory or optional
CCDB export – sometimes you need the custom field value to be exported into CCDB, sometimes it’s enough to save value for custom field within NCDB and no export is necessary
Anonymize – when the cardholder or card are anonymized, should also value for the custom field be removed?
Further, you need to define for which card issuers the custom field should be used. One custom field can be assigned to more card issuers, and also every card issuer can have more custom fields assigned. Use the integrated whisperer to help you find correct card issuer from the list.

Below is the picture how to assign your custom field to a text placeholder when creating new card design. All accessible custom fields are displayed and you can just click them to add. You can also put more custom fields into one placeholder, even in combination with standard text. We are aware that Custom fields problamatic is complex and the short text above doesn’t cover it completely. In case you have some specific questions about custom fields and how to use them, feel free to ask us using our Service Desk (support@aliveplatform.com)

IMAGE For “Image” placeholder, from the drop-down menu, three different types can be chosen:

PHOTO – this adds cardholder photo to the printed card. If the photo doesn’t have correct aspect ratio, it will be cropped using the aspect ratio and height/width of the placeholder.

ISSUER_LOGO – logo of card issuer. Mind that the logo must be added into card issuer profile. The placeholder also supports transparent .png images.

CUSTOM – any raster image can be added from your PC.

BARCODE/QR CODE You can also add a placeholder for a Barcode/QR Code into your design. Currently, you can use the “Barcode Type” drop-down menu to specify the type of code. The following types are available:

QR – standard QR code, readable by any QR reader

EAN 13 – the input string must have 12 digits. Otherwise, the code won’t be generated. The EAN format is designed primarily for serial number encoding.

CODE 39

CODE 128

PDF 417

Using the “Barcode Value” drop-down menu, you can specify which value should be encoded into selected barcode/QR code.

After everything is set up, your design with placeholders can look for example like in the following picture.

Once completed you should check the setup by clicking the “Print Test Card“ button which will use the current setup to print test card. Some sample values will be added into the placeholders. If everything is okay please don’t forget to save the setup clicking the “Save“ button.

Please be careful about “Personal ID” placeholder. To be printed on plastic cards, not only to define the placeholder within card design is necessary. The second part which you have to check is whether the printing of IDs is allowed in NCDB profile of card issuers. This setting up can be found in NCDB -> Card Issuers (left vertical menu) -> Issuer List. Find the card issuer for that you want to allow the print of personal IDs, enter its edit mode and check/uncheck the possibility in “Other details” window.

Assigning Card Design to Card Issuer/Partner To be able to use your defined Card Design for batch card printing, you have to assign this design to Card Issuers/Partners. In both cases, you do it in Card Issuer/Partner editing mode. In “Card Settings” window, choose the correct card type and in drop down menu, select your Card Design. Don’t forget to confirm this change by clicking “Save card issuer”/”Save partner” button!

If you want this Card Design to become the default one, in left vertical menu, go to Licence Management –> Card Designs and click on “Default Designs” button. In drop down menus, you can define default Card Designs for different types and forms of cards. Again, don’t forget to save your changes.

Batch card printing feature is available for ER users (ISIC authority in each country) and personalization center users. Logged in as user of personalization center, please navigate to Orders –> Batch Card Printing page. The list shows you all plastic card order entries (new cards, duplicates) of the orders which are in “In Production“ status and were not marked as printed yet. You can filter out records by your needs using the filter options. To reset the filter please click “Reset filter“ link.

In case you need to edit cardholder name and/or date of birth please click the mouse to the appropriate field and edit the data. You can confirm your changes hiting “Enter“ key on your keyborard or clicking by the mouse somewhere out of the edited fields. To show card preview please click on the magnifying glass icon (marked in the picture below).

In the first column you can find checkboxes to select which records you want to print. You can tick them individually or select all records by ticking the checkbox in the table header. Then click the “Print“ button, NCDB will generate print batch for you, each record (card) as an individual page. Please select your card printer, ensure the header and footer printing is disabled in your web browser and print the cards. Once completed and verified that all cards were printed correctly please mark records (cards) in NCDB as printed clicking “Process“ button at the top of the page (available currently only for personalization center users). This button marks all currently selected records (cards) as printed.

Individual Card Printing Every plastic card with associated card design can be individually re-printed from the card detail (Cards –> Card List –> Card Detail) by clicking the “Print Card“ button. When you hover mouse over this button and wait a while a card preview will be shown.

Although it is not recommended, it is still possible for your Personalization Center to use label printer to print labels for cards. Imagine the following situation: in NCDB, you have just processed the order and you sent it to Personalization Center to print the cards. However, for whatever reason, you need to print only the card labels. How can you do it? Log into the account of Personalization Center and go to Orders -> Order List. Find the “Unprocessed Entries Export” button and press it. The system will download an excel file with all entries, that are ready for printing (each line is one entry – it means one card).

Using the information from this excel file, you can print labels for your cards. This process includes connecting the excel file with a text editor like MS Word and creating the design of your labels there. The process of connecting MS Excel to MS Word will not be described in this tutorial, help can be found on the web. When the labels are printed, you have to tell NCDB that the print was succesfully done. This can be done through importing the modified excel “Unprocessed Entries Export” that you downloaded in previous step. Into this excel file, to the “Process result” column, write “OK” (see the picture). This way, the system will know that labels for these cards were already printed. After saving this file, import it back to NCDB (still logged in as Personalization Center user) using the “Import processed” button. At this moment, the cards that you marked with “OK” should disappear from Batch Card Printing completely and they should appear in NCDB among other issued cards.

The Personalization Center is a restricted interface for an external company that prints ID cards in your country. Under the given personalization centre, you will create a user who has access to orders intended for printing but does not have the right to edit information. The PC user confirms that the card has been printed, and the order status automatically changes to the final status.

The Personalization Center is set at the NCDB - Settings - Personalization Centers

Use the plus button to add a new personalization centre or use the pencil button to edit the existing one.

Each personalization centre must have its own users (usually the company that prints your IDs or you if you print them yourself)

You add users using the head icon in the overview of personalization centres. Fill in the required information. The user must have the checked boxes active and access to orders.In the user Roles section, always select the Personalization Center role The user then logs in to the NCDB Alive Platform via the classic login page. The user of the personalization centre only sees an overview of orders and print orders, which he can mark as printed. It does not have access to other data in the NCDB and cannot make changes to the data.

A view of the NCDB from the personalization centre user's side