Designing Templates with Brady Workstation

When developing an application using the Brady SDKs, knowing how to design templates is essential. Without printing, the Brady SDK is irrelvant to use. Brady Workstation Templates (BWT files) are one of the only file types that can be printed by the Brady SDKs. As a developer, it is important to learn how to download the free version of Brady Workstation and design your own templates for your development process and testing.

Try it out:

The templates below are available to download for testing purposes. Return to this page to follow the tutorial for creating your own templates.

• Template with different shapes.
• Template with a text placeholder.
• Template with a barcode placeholder.

Custom Brady Fonts ( Versions >=1.7.0 )

When designing a template, if a text object is created with one of the custom Brady fonts, you must download the corresponding font below and embed it in your application. If this is not done correctly, the text objects will default to the operating system specific Arial font at print-time.

These fonts include:

• Brady Alpine
• Brady Alpine Bold
• Brady Fixed Width
• Brady Fixed Width Bold

Download these fonts here.

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• Go to workstation.bradyid.com/free to download the free version of the software, which includes the "Basic Design Suite".
• Complete the user information form and select "Download Brady Workstation."
• Unzip the download and follow the installation guide.
• Open the Application and navigate to the "Brady App Center."
• Install the "Basic Design Suite."
• Navigate to the "Apps" tab and install "Custom Designer."
• Click the "Home" button and you will see the installed "Custom Designer" app.

Using Custom Designer

• Open "Custom Designer" and select the desired printer and label part number installed in the printer.

This step is very important! Selecting a printer or part that is 
inconsistent with what you are using will result in designs that could appear off the label.

• Select "Blank Template" to start designing.
• Refer to the Supported Objects tab for your particualar SDK type.

WARNING: Brady Workstation offers more elements than what is currently supported in the SDKs.
Ensure that you are using only supported shapes, text, barcodes, etc. for your templates. 
To see what is not supported, navigate to the Supported Objects page.

• When finished, drag and drop the downloaded .BWT file into your Resources directory within you development environment.
• Refer to Brady's Tutorials to learn more about designing templates.