Retail price-tag production
Every shelf edge in the estate, priced from one place.
Compose a tag once, and Aislewright produces it for every trim, market and campaign you run — as vector PDF for the print vendor, and as ZPL for the thermal printer standing in the store. A preflight pass catches the barcode nobody can scan, and nobody releases it without saying so.
From a 42 mm shelf strip to an A4 range board, including the two pocket inserts that are not paper standards at all.
Compute sits beside the database, so a template change is visible before you have finished reading the form.
Changeovers are split into chunks and drained by parallel workers, so a full estate refresh is one job, not one afternoon.
Compose
A tag is a stack of blocks, not a drawing.
Fourteen block types cover every layout we have been handed, including a price matrix crossed over a size axis and a shelf strip whose campaign panel sits beside the price rather than above it. Each block hides itself when its condition is not met, which is how one template serves both a campaign tag and a plain wordmark tag.
- Banner
- Eyebrow line
- Product name
- Dimensions
- Feature grid
- Price table
- Discount badge
- Barcode
- QR code
- Service icons
- Footer band
- Columns
Verify
The defects that survive a visual review.
An approver looking at a proof cannot see a check digit that is one out, or a barcode narrowed past the point a handheld can read it. Preflight blocks the batch rather than warning about it, and the finished layout is measured in a real browser so clipped content is found before paper is spent.
- Check digits
- EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A and ITF-14 verified, with the correction offered
- Scannability
- Symbols below the module width a handheld can read are refused
- Truncation
- A table quietly capped by its trim is an error, not a surprise
- Overset
- Layout measured after fonts settle, at the size it will print
- Duplicates
- One barcode on two products is a till error waiting to happen
A print vendor and a shop floor want different things.
A vendor wants vector PDF at exact trim, imposed onto press sheets with crop marks. A store wants labels out of the thermal printer by the aisle, now. Those are different media and Aislewright treats them as such — monochrome stock turns a campaign colour into a knocked-out block, and glyphs the printer’s resident fonts lack are substituted rather than silently dropped.
Vendor and office
- Vector PDF at exact trim with bleed
- N-up on A4, A3 and SRA3 with crop marks
- Slug line naming the trim, sheet and stock
- 300 dpi PNG for screens and messaging
In-store thermal
- ZPL II for Zebra-compatible printers
- Native barcode and QR commands, not images
- Per-store queue drained by a local agent
- Copies, darkness and speed per profile
How a label reaches a printer in a shop
Nothing in the cloud can open a connection to a printer behind a store’s firewall. A small agent on the store network asks for work, receives the printer’s own language, and passes those bytes to the device locally. Each location authenticates with its own token, jobs are claimed one at a time, and an agent that dies mid-job releases it rather than losing it.
GET /api/print-agent/next?store=BLR01
x-agent-token: ····
→ 200 { profileId, labels, payload } # raw ZPL
204 nothing waiting
POST /api/print-agent/{id}/done
{ "store": "BLR01", "ok": true }
Printer profiles
- Zebra 203 dpi · 100 × 42 mm shelf label100×42 mm · 203 dpi · darkness 12
- Zebra 203 dpi · 100 × 50 mm shelf label100×50 mm · 203 dpi · darkness 12
- Zebra 300 dpi · 100 × 42 mm shelf label100×42 mm · 300 dpi · darkness 18
- Zebra 203 dpi · 80 × 105 mm pocket insert80×105 mm · 203 dpi · darkness 12
Specifications
Trims, symbologies and sheets.
| Trim | Size | Tiles | Stock |
|---|---|---|---|
| A3 split strip | 80 × 285 mm | 3-up on A3 | 80 gsm |
| A4 split insert | 80 × 105 mm | 12-up on SRA3 | 80 gsm |
| Half A5 vertical | 74 × 210 mm | 6-up on SRA3 | 80 gsm |
| Half A4 vertical | 105 × 297 mm | 2-up on A3 | 80 gsm |
| A6 | 105 × 148 mm | 2-up on A4 landscape | 80 gsm |
| Shelf edge strip | 100 × 42 mm | 18-up on A3 landscape | 80 gsm |
| A4 | 210 × 297 mm | 1-up on A3 | 80 gsm |
Symbologies
- EAN-13ean13
- EAN-8ean8
- UPC-Aupca
- Code 128code128
- ITF-14itf14
Markets
- IndiaINR
- India (Hindi)INR
- SingaporeSGD
- MalaysiaMYR
- IndonesiaIDR
Questions
The things procurement asks first.
- Does it drive our thermal printers, or only produce PDFs?
- Both. Office and vendor output is vector PDF at exact trim, imposed onto A3 or SRA3 with crop marks. Shop-floor output is ZPL II, sent to the printer standing in the store. Barcodes and QR codes use the printer's native commands rather than being sent as images, so they stay crisp at 203 and 300 dpi.
- How does a cloud service reach a printer inside a store?
- It does not, and no honest system claims otherwise. Each location runs a small agent on its own network that asks for work and pushes the bytes at the device locally. Every store has its own token, so one shop cannot drain another's queue, and a job claimed by an agent that dies is retried rather than lost.
- What stops a wrong price reaching a shelf?
- A preflight pass runs before anything can be approved. It verifies barcode check digits, refuses symbols too narrow to scan at the printed size, catches price tables silently truncated by their trim, and measures the finished layout in a real browser to find content that would be clipped. What it finds cannot be approved past silently: an approver has to accept each problem by name, and the acceptance is recorded against them.
- Can we keep using our own product data?
- Yes. Ingestion is a file upload or a REST connector behind one interface, with the same validation and the same staged review either way. Column names are matched against a list of aliases, so nothing has to be renamed to suit us.
- Who is allowed to change a price?
- Approving a batch and setting its price are separate permissions on purpose, so the person who releases a price is not the person who chose it. Eight roles map onto nine permissions, and every write is checked at the mutation rather than by hiding a button.
- What happens to a printed QR code if the link changes?
- Nothing has to be reprinted. Tags carry a short code that resolves through us, so a destination is a setting rather than something set in ink. Scans are counted on the way through, by product, store and campaign.
Recently shipped
- 1.5Preflight recommends: an approver accepts its findings by name, on the record.
- 1.4ZPL II output, per-store print agents and a shop-floor print queue.
- 1.3Durable render queue: 10,000-tag runs drained by parallel workers.
- 1.2Organisation settings, roles, and join requests approved by an owner.
- 1.1Layout-aware preflight measured in a real browser.
- 1.0Block-composed templates across seven trims, with imposition.