Raffle Tickets
These took an age to make but I am so very impressed with myself over the result. And luckily, if I ever want to setup raffle tickets in the future it won’t as time consuming.
Because I use Ubuntu, I wanted to use the tools I had on hand. I used Inkscape to do the design minus the serial numbers, duplicating the one ticket onto an A4 page to make 4 tickets on one page. Then I used the Export Bitmap menu item to save it as a png file.
Then I moved to OpenOffice, using the Word Processor. I added the png to the background of the page and put a 5×5 table over the top. Then I resized the table to fit the shape of the ticket number boxes and inserted into those cells fields (you want the Set Variable field that’s found in the Other menu-option) that calculated the ticket number (one variable name for the stub, and one for the ticket itself). The formula is easy stub=stub+1 and ticket=ticket+1. Then once one A4 page/4 tickets was complete, I copied and pasted this so I ended up with a document of 100 tickets number sequentially from 0001 to 0100. Then I added 2 hidden fields (one for the stub and the other for the ticket) which had the number to start from (so 0 for the first document, 100 for the next, and so forth), using the same kind of field but this time simply stub=0 and ticket=0. With the variable fields, I chose Other Format for the format so I could add leading zeros to get that serial number look.
The problem I found with OpenOffice was that the background keep trying to jump above the fields on the page and that took some time to a) figure out and b) double check all the ticket numbers would print. I kept pushing the png image behind the other objects and eventually I won!
Then came the tedious part, scoring 1000 tickets. Luckily, I remembered my guillotine had a perforation blade and by perforating 3-4 A4 sheets at a time it wasn’t long til this part was done.
After that was cutting the A4 sheets into individual tickets. This took about the same time and before long I had 4 piles of tickets laid face down on my desk ready to flip over and compile into booklets of 10 tickets. This definitely took a bit of time but it was quite satisfying realising we were on the home stretch. To protect the ticket stubs and thinking about the possibilty of people wanting to make notes on their ticket book I added at the last minute an A5 sheet folded almost in half longways. This meant when I stapled the booklet and back-half of the coverpage together, the front of the coverpage laid flat and completely covered the front of the tickets.
And voila, two evenings later I had 1000 tickets compiled into 100 books sitting on my desk!
This process has been simplified because I did take a lot of detours while trying to work out the optimum approach :) I skipped all the teeth knashing and the “But WHY will this not do what I want?!”
By the way, if you’re thinking of running a Raffle in New Zealand, the Internal Affairs website has all the information you need to run one legally – and that’s not as scary as it sounds :)
