We’ll be creating a template that displays a single ticket, and use imposition in the output to generate the full page. Apparently (as far as the Internet can tell me), a raffle ticket is 2.125” x 5.5”, so let’s go ahead and create our template:

• From the Welcome screen, click Create New Template
• Select the Print context
• Change the Page Size to Custom
• Enter the Width as 5.5in and Height as 2.125in
• Change the Margins to 5mm
• Click Finish

Yay for wizards! OL Connect straight-up offers a wizard to create any number of records with unique numbers, which obviously is exactly tailored for this kind of job. Let’s add the numbers now!

• Click on File, Add Data, Generate Counters
• Let’s change a couple of options here:
  • Reduce the Number of records to 96 just to get an equal number of tickets on the page
  • Change the width to 3, to make the numbers show as 001 to 096
• Click Finish

The key to making a pretty raffle ticket design, is to make a pretty raffle ticket design. But that is neither here nor there, so let me show you how to at least make a functional design. Generally, raffle tickets have both horizontal and vertical text, which we can easily reproduce using a couple of positionned boxes:

Here are the important elements here:

• To the left, a single positionned box displays the raffle ticket number, as well as fields to enter participant information (note: this is a quick & dirty underscore-to-the-end field addition, we’ll look at another tip to fix that later!)
• On the right, another positioned box displays the number again for the main ticket part.
• The middle vertical line separates the stub from the main part of the ticket. This is normally where the paper would be pre-perforated.
• The currently selected box in the image is where we’ll add the main contents, which is obviously static, using headers, boxes and a bit of formatting:

In OL Connect, imposition is done in the Output module, which includes both Job Presets and Output Presets. In this case however, we only need to concentrate on the Output preset, since this is were Imposition is done:

• Click File, then Print Presets, then Output Creation Settings.
• Click Next to start the wizard.
• Select your printer model, or just use PDF for this test.
• Check the Imposition box to enable imposition, then click Next.
• Change the Imposition Sheet to Letter and Orientation to Landscape.
• Under Position, choose the Method: Center.
• Change Horizontal repetitions to 2, Vertical ones to 4. This gives us our 8 tickets per page.
• Note that we could add some space between the tickets by modifying the value of the Horizontal Gap and Vertical Gap fields.
• Click Next > until the end and save the Output Preset as, say, Raffle-Ticket-8-up.

And now we come to the final, easy part – printing. Since the Output preset has already been created, all we need to do is to use the Print Wizard:

• Click File, then Print
• Choose the Raffle-Ticket-8-up as the Output Creation, and <default> as the Job Creation.
• Click on Print to generate the PDF output (or to send to your chosen printer).
• Save the PDF file somewhere you can reach.

The PDF displays, of course, our 8 tickets per page. If you pay attention to the numbers on the PDF you may realize that the first page’s tickets are not numbered from 001 to 008, but rather contains the tickets 001, 013, 025, 037, 049, 061, 073 and 085. This is because the Cut & Stack Imposition is meant to also be telescoping. So instead of creating 8 tickets per page, it created 8 stacks of 12 tickets which you can place on top of one another to make your stack of 96.

Generating more tickets
Once you’ve created a series of tickets you might want to create more later. And that’s pretty easy, thankfully! You can simply run Step 2 again and change the Starting value to one that’s higher than your highest previous ticket. For example, using 97 as the Starting Value and creating another 96 tickets ensures that you continue the existing series, if you ever need more tickets at the last minute!