Label Objects - general overview

Simply put, a typical label is a collection of several objects with their properties, arranged in a particular order on the label's surface area. The label acts as a container for the objects. The process of designing a label consists of:

1. selecting an object;
2. drawing (inserting) the object on the surface area of the label;
3. editing or/and specifying the object's properties.

The steps assume that you have already created an empty label design and that the label is on the designer's editor workplace.

1, 2. Selecting and drawing(inserting) objects on the surface area of the label
Object actions are located in the Objects section of the main menu and also on the toolbar as icons.

Select, the necessary Object item.
Move your mouse cursor to the surface area of the label and then left-click.
If you want several instances of the same object, then just keep on clicking on the surface area of the label, observing necessary distance between the objects.
Select another Object item and repeat above actions.
Notice that when you select an Object item and move your mouse to the surface area of the label, the mouse cursor changes to a pointer, similar to the object's icon, e.g.:
After you have drawn the object(s) on the label, to re-set your mouse cursor back to default or normal, click on the first blue arrow on the tool bar

3. Editing or/and specifying object properties
Each time you insert an object on the label, the Object Properties Inspector, located left, is activated and the object's properties are displayed. All the properties are editable.

object icons on the toolbar

objects on designer editor
example of label design objects

List of available objects in Label Mix

	Simple text, single line of text, including punctuations and spaces. Text can be formated: font face, size, color, alignment, transparency etc.
	Compound text. single line of text consisting of three parts: (prefix, Text and suffix).
	Polytext. Combines multiple text (items) with same or different formats into one single-line text object. Extremely useful for mail merging or creating complex barcode (EAN128) with multiple strings. Each text can as well be linked to database fields or without such.
	Paragraph. multiple lines of text sharing a common format.
	Lines. Creates linear objects
	Rectangle. Creates rectangular shapes
	Ellipse. Circle object with unequal width and height. Creates elliptical shapes. See Rectangle , Circle
	Circle. Creates circular shapes - same as an ellipse, but with equal height and width.
	Barcodes an optical machine-readable representation of data to uniquely identify an item.
	BarCode 2D PDF417 used for encoding large amount of data, usually up to one or two-hundred characters are encoded in a single symbol.
	Symbol. Symbol can be a special character transformed from a particular font character or a specific symbol from a predefined list (collection).
	Picture or Image
	Layout. Layout acts as container for other objects, for organizing them into rows and columns.
	Table.

Additional notes about objects properties

Most objects' properties can be edited/specified from Object Properties Inspector. However, some objects' properties, due to their nature, can additionally be accessed using the the context menu or by clicking on them. For example, image object.

Units of measurement
Object properties such as location (top, left), font size (height), width, height, and other dimensions are displayed using the currently active unit of measurement - mm (millimeters), cm (centimeters) or in (inches). The editor ruler also displays its demarcation using the currently active unit of measurement.
Unit of measurement can be set either by using the Options menu item on the main menu bar or the Units menu.

Special Text DisplayFormats
Text , Compound text and Polytext objects have special property named DisplayFormats that can be additionally used when the objects are linked to a field from the database.
Example 1: The text object retrieves its data from the date-time field of the database, one of the following DisplayFormat string can be used to display the final output:

DisplayFormat string	result
d-m-y	8-6-11
dd-mm-yy	08-06-11
dd-mmm-yyy	08-jun-2011
d/mmmm-yyyy	8/June-2011
d-mmmm-yyy hh:nn	8-June-2011 18:04
d-m-y h:n	8-6-11 18:4
dd 'de' mmmm 'del' yyyy	08 of June from 2011

Example 2: In the same manner, if you are linking the text object to a currency or decimal field from database with, in this example, for a field with holding the price data you can specify for the text object DisplayFormat property as follows:

DisplayFormat string	result
00000	04590
###,##0.00	4.590,18
#####0 €	4590 €
#####0.0000 €	4590,1780 €
#####0.0	4590,2 €

Border property

text and symbol objects have additional property named border. By default, the property is not activated. If you decide to use the property, then to activate the property, check (mark, tick) the Show Border box in the Object Properties Inspector. Specify the necessary options for the border appearance:

Locked property

rectangle and image objects have a property named Locked. By default, the property is not activated. If you decide to use the property, then to activate the property, check (mark, tick) the Locked box in the Object Properties Inspector. Additional small yellow pin-size rectangle top left corner of the image is activated (see the second picture) in the pic. below.
When an object is locked, you can not resize or delete it and you can not include it in multi-selection with other objects. To select a locked object, click on the pin-size rectangle at the top left corner.

Locked: additional property for image object

A locked image object on Label Design editor

Additional Object Editors
Image, Symbol, Paragraph, Table and PolyText, Barcode 2D PDF417 objects have additional property editors which, when clicked, will open either a dialog box (for Image object) or windows for text input or enables selection from list.