Badges are an expected, even necessary hassle for conference organizers; they identify who’s allowed in the door, help people start conversations, and end up as souveniers once the conference is finished. The problem with badges, though, is that they can be a real pain to put together.

Design-wise, each badge at a conference is essentially the same— but the fact each badge has different information, getting them printed (and looking good afterwards) can be a challenge. Paying a print shop to fill-in the badges can be prohibitively expensive, if they offer the service at all (and having the badges printed is pricey enough). Trying to print over a blank sheet of badges with names, etc, is error prone and, in most cases, the badges come off obviously homemade. Using programs like Publisher isn’t hard to do, but feels heavy, ends up being less nimble if you need to make changes or fix mistakes, and, depending on your OS, may or may not be an option.

For RubyConf 2006, I wrote a small script called Badger which we used to generate the conference badges. It’s a lightweight solution that relies on the use of a PDF form template (which I have a pretty good amount of experience creating), a YAML data source (something any Rubyist can tackle), and an Open Source tool called PDF Toolkit to handle the form filling. It ended up being the right tool for the job; the results are professional, it’s agile (in terms of data changes), easy to automate, and lacking any stringent design limitations (big plus there).

I recently refactored the tool into a RubyGem, and I’m happy to announce its initial release. Check out the documentation, and see the sample project tarball.

You can install the gem, as you might expect, with:

sudo gem install badger

You’ll need to be able to create PDF forms (probably with the full version of Adobe Acrobat), and have PDF Toolkit installed.