Ticket Printing Options

For small organizations in particular, printing of tickets may be somewhat problematic. Without a doubt, the most ideal method of printing box office tickets is with a specialized thermal ticket printer such as those offered by Boca Systems or Practical Automation, since individual tickets can be quickly printed on demand. Also you can generally purchase ticket stock which can be pre-printed on the reverse with information such as your conditions of sale if required. You can also purchase stock in a variety of colors and containing special security features.

Unfortunately though, these specialist printers cost a lot more than mass produced laser or inkjet printers, where in the latter case, the replacement cost of the ink cartridges or other consumables may often exceed the initial purchase cost of the printer! For organizations selling only a few thousand tickets per year, it is often difficult to justify the cost of a specialist printer which will only print tickets and nothing else.

And purchasing a used thermal printer is also not recommended, since all too often, the only reason the printer is being offered for sale is becasue it is an extremely old model or is effectively at the end of its service life. And the cost of replacing thermal print heads is certainly not cheap - even assuming the manufacturer still supports repairs for well out of date models.

Laser or InkJet Printers

Fortunately, HandyTix also gives you the option of printing tickets on low cost laser or inkjet printers. In this case, tickets are printed on a standard Letter or A4 size sheet of paper. Normally you would purchase colored paper of a greater paper weight than for standard office printing and have a local print shop perforate the page into four or five horizontal sections per page. Alternatively you can purchase pre-perforated paper from specialist paper suppliers specially designed for ticket printing, which may also have a perforated stub on the right-hand side.

You can set your print options to print any number of tickets per page you wish, however the main inconvenience of using a laser or inkjet printer compared with a specialist thermal printer is that the system prints tickets for one customer at a time. So for example if a customer only purchases one ticket, then this will be printed on the top section of your ticket stock. So to avoid wasting paper, you need to reverse the paper and put the sheet back through your printer to use the remaining sections on the sheet. Fortunately, the majority of ticket purchases are in multiples of two, so if you set up your page to contain four tickets, it is not too much of an inconvenience to re- insert sheets to print tickets on the full sheet.

If however you have a printer that will allow you to print on any sized paper, you may be able to print single tickets on paper cut to a small size, but generally speaking, because tickets are relatively small, feeding them through a low-cost printer may cause problems with either alignment or jamming.

Another alternative, if you are happy to print relatively large tickets, is to use the "envelope" option on your printer, which could then be used to print single tickets from paper which is cut to the same size as a standard envelope.

Online Ticket Printing

For online ticket purchases, you can offer your customers the option of printing PDF tickets at home. In this case, the ticket is printed on a sheet of paper through a standard printer, normally with a bar-code for security. But if you are offering this option, you would normally only allow PDF printing for reserved ticket sales, or where you have the ability to scan the bar codes at the entrance to the venue. Otherwise there is really nothing to stop someone from copying any PDF ticket, and unless you are carefully verifying the name and address with ID at the door, it is difficult to assure the validity of such tickets.