The challenge
Issuing ID cards for thousands of students and staff in Arabic and English together is not a simple design task: long Arabic names must never be clipped, text corrupted by legacy encoding must render correctly, and print measurements must match the ISO ID-1 standard to the millimeter for printers and readers to accept them. Manual entry per card meant endless errors.
The solution
We built a card printing system working directly on top of the institution’s database:
- Bilingual card templates measured precisely to the ISO ID-1 standard
- Data and photos pulled straight from the database — no manual entry
- Arabic text handling: long names and correction of inherited encoding corruption
- Batch printing (a whole department or intake) in one command
- Pre-print preview to catch data anomalies early
The outcome
Cards are now issued in large batches with uniform quality, and the Arabic name renders correctly and completely beside its English counterpart — from one trusted data source.