Print Designer: User

When a staff member opens a user record and chooses Print User, Aeon drops that person's details into a user print template and produces a printable document — typically a reader's ticket, a registration card, or an ID credential. The Print Designer is where you design those templates: which of the user's details appear, where each piece sits on the page, and how many print per sheet.

This is the configuration side of user printing. Printing a card from a user record is a day-to-day task with its own permissions; this page is about building and maintaining the layout those prints are based on.

When you'll use this

• You're setting up Aeon and want reader's tickets to carry your institution's name, the patron's details, and a scannable barcode.
• An existing card needs a tweak — a new field, a logo, a larger name, a different paper size.
• You print several cards at once and want to fit, say, four to a sheet of label stock.
• You're moving off the Aeon 6 Word templates and want to bring a .docx design in as a starting point.

This is the same designer used for every print template

The user designer is one mode of Aeon's print designer. The Request, Callslip, Invoice, Invoice Statement, and Digitization Request templates all use the same canvas and tools — only the available fields and the sample preview data differ, because each type is built around a different record. This one is built around the user record, so it offers user, address, status, research, and institution fields. If you've designed a callslip, this works identically.

Opening the user print designer

1. Open the Customization Manager.
2. In the left navigation, under Designers, choose Print Designer. It opens on the Request template.
3. Print Designer expands into one entry per template type — Request, Callslip, User, Invoice, Invoice Statement, and Digitization Request. Choose User.

The designer auto-selects the default template (or the first one) and loads it onto the canvas — Aeon's built-in one is named Default User Card. If no templates exist yet, you'll see "No User templates found" with a Create Template button.

You need the Designers capability to edit

Creating, renaming, duplicating, deleting, importing, exporting, or saving a template requires the Designers configuration capability. Without it you can still reach the page and look at templates, but the save and template-management actions are blocked.

Generating a Preview takes either the Designers capability or View access to Users — the record type this template prints from. Note that printing a card from a user record is a separate, operational permission: a front-desk staffer can print cards without being able to redesign the template.

Use a real screen

The designer needs room to work. On a phone-sized screen it shows "Larger Display Required" and asks you to switch to a tablet or desktop. Plan to design templates at a desk, not on a handheld.

How the designer is laid out

With a template open you have a toolbar across the top, a panel on the left, and the page canvas filling the rest:

Area	What it's for
Toolbar (top)	The template selector and its ⋯ menu, undo/redo, page size, orientation, Margins, the layout mode, records-per-page, group/ungroup, Preview, zoom (50% / 75% / 100% / 125% / 150%), the save controls, and a ? button that opens the keyboard-shortcut list.
Left panel	Two tabs — Fields and Insert — for adding content to the page (see below).
Canvas (center)	The card itself, drawn to scale with rulers. You arrange everything here by dragging.

You edit a piece of the card by selecting it — a small floating toolbar appears just above the selection with that element's settings. Nothing you place is permanent until you save, and the save indicator always tells you where you stand: Saved, Unsaved, or Saving....

Adding content: the Fields and Insert tabs

Everything on the card is an element. The left panel gives you two ways to add one.

The Fields tab

The Fields tab is a searchable list of the user data you can print, grouped by category in this order:

Category	What's in it
User Fields	Username, first/last/preferred/display name, email, phone, fax, organization, department, ID and ID type, billing category, and User Info 1–5
Address Fields	Street, city, state, zip, country
Secondary Address	The same again for the patron's alternate address
User Status Fields	Status, Cleared, Expiration Date, Last Changed Date, Registration Status
Research Fields	Research topics and the sharing preference
Staff Fields	The staff member doing the printing — Staff Username, Staff First Name, Staff Last Name
Institution Fields	The institution's own details, such as Institution Name
Custom Fields	Any user custom fields you've defined — these appear automatically

Each field carries a small badge for its data type (for example STRING or DATE). Type in the Search fields... box to filter.

• Click a field to drop it on the page. It lands as a labeled row — the field's label next to its value (for example, User ID: followed by the value).
• Hold ⌥ Alt while clicking to drop the value alone, with no label.
• Drag a field onto the canvas to place it exactly where you want.
• To add several at once, ⌘/Ctrl-click each field, then drag them on or use Add to page — they stack as one block in the order you picked them.

The panel reminds you of this at the bottom: "Fields land with a label — hold ⌥ Alt for the field alone. ⌘/Ctrl-click to select several, then drag or add them as one block."

On the canvas, fields show realistic sample values — John Smith, username jsmith, User ID STU123456, Sample University, History Department, status Active, jsmith@example.edu, a Springfield address, research topics, and an expiration date — so you can judge spacing before printing.

The Insert tab

The Insert tab holds the building blocks that aren't tied to a single field:

Element	What it puts on the card
Text	A static label that prints exactly as typed — your institution's name, or the words "Reader's Ticket"
Field	A single data value, unbound at first — you choose which field after placing it.
Barcode	A scannable barcode generated from a field value — typically the username, so staff can scan the card to look the patron up. Code 39, Code 128, and QR Code are available.
Line	A horizontal rule for separating sections.
Vertical Line	A vertical rule — for splitting the card into columns.
Rectangle	A box or border.
Image	A logo or graphic from the image gallery.

Below those, an Auto Fields group prints values about the printout itself rather than the user: Page Number, Page Count, Current Date, and Printed By.

Repeating tables — billing charges, payment history, notes — belong to the request, invoice, and statement templates, which have that data behind them. They aren't offered on a user template.

Editing an element

Select an element and its floating toolbar appears above it. What the toolbar offers depends on the element:

• A field shows its field button (the bound field's name, with a chevron), a Format button, and text-styling controls — font family and size, bold, italic, underline, alignment, and text color. Click the field button to open a searchable field picker and choose a different field; or double-click the field on the canvas to jump straight into that picker.

  Beside Format sits the fallback field button: pick a second field there and Aeon prints it whenever the bound one is empty — Preferred Name falling back to First Name, say. This is how the hidden Word IF cascades are rebuilt on a card. Once a fallback is set, the element carries a small blue badge in its bottom-right corner on the canvas; click the badge to change or remove it. Text and barcode elements don't offer this — a barcode has its field button but no Format and no fallback.

  

  

• Format (the sliders button) opens a small popover: a Format menu — None, Currency, Number, Short Date, Long Date, or Date & Time — plus Prefix and Suffix boxes, hinted with "e.g. $" and "e.g. %". It's how you print an expiration date as a long date, say. Picking a field also applies a default format for its data type.

  

• Text offers typography controls; double-click a text element to edit its words in place.

• Line and Vertical Line offer Stroke color (whose popover also sets Stroke width in pixels) and a Stroke style menu of Solid, Dashed, or Dotted. Rectangle offers those plus Fill & corners — a Fill color, or none, and a Corner radius.

• Image and Barcode offer their own source/appearance controls.

• Visibility conditions (the eye button) controls when the element prints — see Hiding an element that doesn't apply.

• Position & size (the four-arrows button) places the element precisely: X and Y, Width and Height, all in inches. On text, field and auto-field elements it also offers Rotation presets of 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270° and vertical-alignment buttons; shapes, images and barcodes show the four measurements only. In Flow layout mode the popover adds a Band menu for moving the element to another band.

  

• Duplicate (⌘D) and Delete (⌫) finish the toolbar.

A typical reader's ticket

A Text element with your institution name at the top, a Field bound to the patron's name in large bold type, fields for the username and expiration date, and a Barcode bound to the username near the bottom so the card can be scanned at the desk.

Arranging and fine-tuning

• Move an element by dragging it; resize it with its handles.
• Nudge a selection with the arrow keys — hold Shift for a larger step.
• Select several with Shift-click (or ⌘/Ctrl-click); a floating align/distribute toolbar appears, and you can Group them (⌘G) so they move as one. Ungroup with ⌘⇧G.
• Standard editing shortcuts work on the canvas: copy (⌘C), paste (⌘V), duplicate (⌘D), delete (Delete/Backspace), select all (⌘A), and undo / redo (⌘Z and ⌘⇧Z).
• To move around without the mouse: Tab cycles through the elements on the page (⇧Tab reverses), F6 cycles between the panel and the canvas, and Escape clears the selection.

Press ? anywhere in the designer for the full shortcut list on screen.

Page setup

The toolbar shapes the physical page:

• Page size — Letter, Legal, A4, or A5, plus any page sizes your site has defined. Custom... opens a dialog for a one-off Width and Height in inches or millimeters; Manage page sizes... is where the site-wide list is maintained.
• Orientation — Portrait or Landscape.
• Margins — opens Page Margins (in) with Top, Right, Bottom and Left boxes, from 0 to 3 inches in steps of 0.125. Set them and click Apply.
• Layout mode — Absolute places everything at fixed coordinates, which is the usual choice for a card. Flow stacks content in bands that grow with the data — see Print Designer: Flow Layout.
• Records per page — in Absolute mode, the grid button (it reads, for example, 1 per page). For one card per page, leave it at 1. To print cards onto label stock, open it and set Rows (up to 10) and Columns (up to 4), with optional Row Gap / Column Gap in inches, then click Apply. Aeon shows the resulting Cell size and how many Records per page that makes. In Flow mode the toolbar replaces the grid with a record separation control.

Design your layout to fit one cell; Aeon repeats it across the grid, one user per cell, at print time.

Hiding an element that doesn't apply

Not every patron has every detail — a secondary address, a fax number, a research topic. Rather than printing a stray label with nothing after it, hide the element when its data is blank.

1. Select the element and open its Visibility conditions popover (the eye button). With nothing set it reads "Always shown. Add conditions to hide this element for certain records."

2. For the simplest case, turn on Hide if empty — the element drops off any card where that field has no value.

   

3. For anything more involved, click Edit conditions... to open the Edit Conditions dialog, headed "Hide this element when:". Until you add one it says "No conditions defined. Click "Add Condition" to create one." Click Add Condition, choose a field and an operator — is empty, is not empty, equals, does not equal, contains, is greater than, or is less than — and a value where one's needed, then Save. With more than one condition, the element hides when any of them match.

   

Any element carrying a condition gets a small amber badge with a crossed-out-eye icon in its top-right corner, so you can see at a glance which parts of the card are conditional. Hover the badge and it tells you how many conditions the element has — or "Hidden: Conditions not met" when the element is one the current sample data would drop. Aeon's built-in card uses these heavily: the whole Secondary Address block, the fax line, and the research topics are all conditional.

If you're recreating an Aeon 6 template, this is where the hidden Word IF field codes are rebuilt — visually, instead of in toggled field codes.

Previewing before you commit

Click Preview in the toolbar at any time. Aeon renders the current template to a PDF using sample data, and opens it in a dialog headed Preview: followed by the template's name (for example Preview: Default User Card). From there you can Download the sample PDF or send it to your Print dialog. Preview reflects the canvas as it stands, including edits you haven't saved yet — so you can check fonts, spacing, barcodes, and grid layout without touching a real patron's record.

Saving and managing templates

• Save with the toolbar's Save button or ⌘S; the indicator switches to Saved.
• Discard changes with the discard button that appears next to the save indicator while you have unsaved edits — it reverts to the last saved version.

Switching templates discards unsaved edits

The designer tracks unsaved changes per template. Save before you switch to a different card, move to another template type, or import — selecting another template loads its saved state and your in-progress edits are not kept.

You can keep several user templates — a full reader's ticket and a compact barcode-only label, say. The template selector on the left of the toolbar switches between them, and its ⋯ menu manages them:

• New Template — start a fresh card.
• Duplicate — copy the current one as a starting point (you name the copy).
• Rename — give it a meaningful name.
• Set as Default — mark which card the print dialog reaches for first. Only one template per type is the default; setting a new one clears the old.
• Export / Import — download the template (with its images) as an .aeon-print-template.zip package, or load one back in — handy for moving a design between sites or environments.
• Import from Word Document… — bring a Word template in (see below).
• Delete — remove the template.

Bringing a Word template across

Coming from the Aeon 6 desktop client, you don't have to rebuild your card by hand.

1. Open the template ⋯ menu and choose Import from Word Document….
2. Pick your existing .doc or .docx file.
3. Aeon parses it, converts the merge fields it recognizes into designer fields, pulls in images, and creates a new user template — then shows an Import Summary of what came across.

Review the import, especially unmapped and IF fields

• Importing creates a new template and switches to it. If you have unsaved edits, Aeon warns you first — they'll be lost, so save before importing.
• Unmapped fields: merge fields Aeon can't match to a known field come in unmapped and carry a warning badge on the canvas. Select each and choose the right field from its picker.
• Conditional IF fields are not converted. Rebuild that logic with element conditions.
• Always Preview an imported template before making it the default — spacing usually needs a touch-up.

How the card you design gets used

When a staff member opens a user record and chooses Print User, Aeon opens a print dialog showing a live PDF of the card. If you keep more than one user template the dialog shows a template picker; with only one there's nothing to choose. When the picker appears, Aeon pre-selects, in order: the template that staff member last used, then the one you marked default, then the first available. So the default is the fallback pre-selection rather than a forced choice — staff can print any template — which is why it's worth setting it to the card most of your staff should start from.