Conference Name Badger

The principal goes like this:

1. Make/obtain a template PDF with blank name badges laid out
2. Download attendee list in CSV format
3. Wave magic wand
4. Email the resulting PDF to a print shop

The magic wand is this repo.

Clone it now.

The .gitignore includes pdf, psd, csv and other extensions so you can just work in your clone's working tree.

Open the namebadger.py script and start hacking. Look around for the following (line numbers not given as they are likely to change).

Setting the template file

PDF_TEMPLATE = 'A3-Layout-Attendee-Test.pdf'

Setting the CSV input file and which columns to use for attendee names

CSV_FILE = 'devopsdays-cape-town-2018_guestlist.csv'
FIRSTNAME_COLUMN = 30
LASTNAME_COLUMN = 31

Setting positions of names on the page

How you format this depends on how many badges fit on a page. For double sided 110mm square badges, you should fit 3x2 on an A3 page - 3 badges with each name printed twice. This looks like this:

POSITIONS = [
    [[112, 1026], [430, 1026]],
    [[112, 714], [430, 714]],
    [[112, 400], [430, 400]],
]

Where the first value of each tuple holds the left-right coordinates, and the second values hold the bottom-top coords. The coords start in the bottom left corner of a page, so higher numbers go right and up. You will have to experiment here.

Text color

TEXT_RGB = (16, 95, 89)

Where the R, G and B values can be lifted straight from your image editor of choice.

Text size

Text size is a little complicated, because each name is printed with an initial maximum size, but scaled down progressively if the name is too long to fit at that size.

TEXT_START_SIZE = 24

TEXT_SIZE_THRESHOLDS = (
    (220, 16),
    (210, 17),
    (195, 18),
    (180, 19),
    (170, 20),
    (160, 21),
    (150, 22),
    (140, 23),
)

Where TEXT_START_SIZE is the maximum starting size, and TEXT_SIZE_THREHOLDS is a table of lengths versus point sizes, used for deciding whether to scale down an individual name to fit in the space available.

Changing the font

FIRSTNAME_FONT = 'Avenir-Bold'
LASTNAME_FONT = 'Avenir'

You'll need this font to be present in the fonts/ subdirectory and you'll need to register it using reportlab in the script (if it's not a standard system font).

Output

The script blurts out a file called out.pdf each time it is run.

Caveats

I have no idea what I am doing, so it's likely this script will break all over the place. It's also terrible because I am really lazy. Sorry about that. Contributions welcome.