Generating ball tickets/programmes using LaTeX

My father does a lot of Scottish Country dancing, he was a treasurer for the Clan MacKenzie association for quite a while, and a president there for about 10 years too. He was given a task for making some ball tickets, but each one being uniquely numbered.

After hearing him swear at LibreOffice for a bit, then at Avery’s label making software, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

First step was to come up with a template. The programs were to be A6-size booklets; made up of A5 pages folded in half. For ease of manufacture, they would be printed two to a page on A4 pages.

The first step was to come up with the template that would serve as the outer and inner pages. The outer page would have a placeholder that we’d substitute.

\documentclass[a5paper,landscape,16pt]{minimal}
\usepackage{multicol}
\setlength{\columnsep}{0cm}
\usepackage[top=1cm, left=0cm, right=0cm, bottom=1cm]{geometry}
\linespread{2}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{2}[]

\vspace*{1cm}

\begin{center}
\begin{em}
We thank you for your company today\linebreak
and helping to celebrate 50 years of friendship\linebreak
fun and learning in the Redlands.
\end{em}
\end{center}

\begin{center}
\begin{em}
May the road rise to greet you,\linebreak
may the wind always be at your back,\linebreak
may the sun shine warm upon your face,\linebreak
the rains fall soft upon your fields\linebreak
and until we meet again,\linebreak
may God gold you in the palm of his hand.
\end{em}
\end{center}

\vspace*{1cm}

\columnbreak
\begin{center}
\begin{em}
\textbf{CLEVELAND SCOTTISH COUNTRY DANCERS\linebreak
50th GOLD n' TARTAN ANNIVERSARY TEA DANCE}\linebreak
\linebreak
1973 - 2023\linebreak
Saturday 20th May 2023\linebreak
1.00pm for 1.30pm - 5pm\linebreak
Redlands Memorial Hall\linebreak
South Street\linebreak
Cleveland\linebreak
\end{em}
\end{center}

\begin{center}
\begin{em}
Live Music by Emma Nixon \& Iain Mckenzie\linebreak
Black Bear Duo
\end{em}
\end{center}

\vspace{1cm}

\begin{center}
\begin{em}
Cost \$25 per person, non-dancer \$15\linebreak
\textbf{Ticket No \${NUM}}
\end{em}
\end{center}
\end{multicols}
\end{document}

The inner pages were the same for all booklets, so we just came up with one file that was used for all. I won’t put the code here, but suffice to say, it was similar to the above.

So we had two files; ticket-outer.tex and ticket-inner.tex. What next? Well, we needed to make 100 versions of ticket-outer.tex, each with a different number substituted for $NUM, and rendered as PDF. Similarly, we needed the inner pages rendered as a PDF (which we can do just once, since they’re all the same).

#!/bin/bash
NUM_TICKETS=100

set -ex

pdflatex ticket-inner.tex
for n in $( seq 1 ${NUM_TICKETS} ); do
	sed -e 's:\\\${NUM}:'${n}':' \
            < ticket-outer.tex \
            > ticket-outer-${n}.tex
	pdflatex ticket-outer-${n}.tex
done

This gives us a single ticket-outer.pdf, and 100 different ticket-inner-NN.pdf files that look like this:

Now, we just need to put everything together. The final document should have no margins, and should just import the relevant PDF files in-place. So naturally, we just script it; this time stepping every 2 tickets, so we can assemble the A4 PDF document with our A5 tickets: outer pages of the odd-numbered ticket, outer pages of the even-numbered ticket, followed by two copies of the inner pages. Repeat for all tickets. We also need to ensure that initial paragraph lines are not indented, so setting \parindent solves that.

This is the rest of my quick-and-dirty shell script:

cat > tickets.tex <<EOF
\documentclass[a4paper]{minimal}
\usepackage[top=0cm, left=0cm, right=0cm, bottom=0cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}
\begin{document}
EOF
for n in $( seq 1 2 ${NUM_TICKETS} ); do
	m=$(( ${n} + 1 ))
	cat >> tickets.tex <<EOF
\includegraphics[width=21cm]{ticket-outer-${n}.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=21cm]{ticket-outer-${m}.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=21cm]{ticket-inner.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=21cm]{ticket-inner.pdf}
EOF
done
cat >> tickets.tex <<EOF
\end{document}
EOF
pdflatex tickets.tex

The result is a 100-page PDF, which when printed double-sided, will yield a stack of tickets that are uniquely numbered and serve as programmes.