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Printing Signs
Office has built-in sign making capabilities. Creating signs principally involves saving sign-related text for each item that needs a sign and choosing a layout.
Go to the install page's Products tab and enable the ProdUserModule. This will appear as Sign/Web Info when editing items in the item editor. NCG co-ops may want to enable the CoopDealsSigns plugin. This provides some additional logo'd sign layouts and the Gill Sans fonts. These fonts are not freeware. Be sure you have appropriate font licenses for every person/computer printing signs. The Co+op Deals logos are property of NCG and cannot be used by non-members.
Signs contain four pieces of information: the brand name, the item's description, the package size, and the price. These bits of text may draw from multiple sources.
For both brand and description, the values in the Sign/Web Info section will be used when present. If not, the regular description and brand are used. The alternative fields are provided (and preferred) to eliminate any receipt related length restrictions. Many of the standard sign layouts will automatically wrap the description onto two lines. The Sign/Web Info description may be split into two lines to manually specify exactly where the line break should be.
The package size is drawn from the pack size field in the item editor. If that's missing, a value may be pulled from the vendor's catalog instead. One PLU items (items whose UPCs begin with 8 or more zeroes) the PLU is shown in place of the size.
The price is may be specified when printing signs from advanced search as either retail or sale, current or upcoming. Printing signs from batches is recommended if the desired price is not the current retail or sale price. Printing from a batch will always use that batch's pricing and resolves any ambiguity if there is more than one upcoming price to choose from.
Multiple pricing is generally inferred. Prices ending in 33, 66, or 67 will be displayed as 3/$X. Prices ending in 50 are displayed as 2/$X. Prices ending in 25 are displayed as 4/$X. Prices ending in 80 are displayed as 5/$X. Prices ending in 00 are shown in the highest available multiple where the total stays under $10 (e.g., a $3 item will be 3/$9 where as a $2 item will be 4/$8). When creating Co+op Deals batches from the built-in tools, their multipliers do get imported along with the prices and override the default behavior.
Adding a secondary brand & description for every item may be a fairly time consuming undertaking. If you can get a hold of nice text in a spreadsheet with UPCs, you can import all that text using the Ad Text Import tool. This is typically the very first entry on the site map. NCG publishes exactly such a file. The import does not understand multiple worksheets so you do have to save each sheet (tab) as CSV and import them one at a time but it's still much faster than manual entry. The import will not overwrite any existing sign text.
There are two main routes to printing signs. The first is from a sales batch by clicking Print Sale Signs. Using this method, the only additional choice is which layout to use. The prices will be taken from the batch. The second route is from advanced search results using the using the Tags/Signs button. In this case you must specify which price to use as well as a layout. Printing from a batch is more reliable when dealing with either type of "upcoming" price.
The two heavily used layouts are Signage12UpL and Signage16UpP. Signage12UpL prints 12 signs (3 rows x 4 columns) with a landscape page layout. Signage12UpP prints 16 signs (4 rows x 4 columns) with a portrait landscape. Both are simply black text on a white background and are intended for use with pre-printed paper that already has the store's specific branding (besides generally being more cost-effective, this avoids re-inventing the wheel for every store). The font size choices are based off Co+op Deals and they should fit on pre-printed Co+op Deals sign blanks. The Co+op Deals layouts include the logo in the PDF and have variants for 12 and 16 signs in both light and dark (A/B) variants.