E-ticket issuing preference questions

[trebor79]

Most importantly )) , their adoption hastens the coming of the day when the industry no longer needs to pay to maintain magnetic-stripe equipment.

Industry could do that today couldn't it, by printing the QR code onto the orange cardboard?

 

[py_megapixel]

My main bugbear is that everywhere I've bought them from so far has put them in a PDF of nonstandard page size, which is not great if you want to print them onto standard sized (e.g. A4) paper

 

[trebor79]

My main bugbear is that everywhere I've bought them from so far has put them in a PDF of nonstandard page size, which is not great if you want to print them onto standard sized (e.g. A4) paper

Yes I've noticed that too. They appear to be sized to print on the bog roll ticket printers that some portable ticket machines issue. I suspect a bit if laziness and just using the same formatting engine as is used for the portable machines.

 

[zero]

It's easy (if you know what you are doing) to change the page size of a PDF, or you could just print-screen and paste onto an A4 document.

 

[XAM2175]

Industry could do that today couldn't it, by printing the QR code onto the orange cardboard?

Theoretically yes, although I understand that there are some technical limitations preventing that at the moment - something like the fact that the current generation of TVMs cannot reliably print the barcode (which is an Aztec code, not QR) at a size small enough to fit onto CCST alongside the human-readable text. Don't quote me on that, though.

There other big spanner, of course, is that London Underground still require mag-stripe encoding on tickets with cross-London validity.

 

[infobleep]

I regularly travel between two stations using off-peak returns. Sometimes I am given a lift back and have an unused return portion. This means I have two return portions when I next travel as it still makes sends to buy a return.

It has thus dawned on me that in this case, I'd prefer separate PDFs for each ticket.

However, I then need to remember which one I've used it not used, so I don't accidentally reuse one twice. Very important if I don't pass barriers in use and have my tickets checked. Currently, I do this by moving orange tickets around in my wallet. How easy would it be to do that with e-tickets? I guess I could download them and move them between folders on my phone, as and when I use them. This still lends itself to single PDFs.

If using split tickets, it may be that you use up one ticket but not another, so again it might be useful to know this in some way.

You may also finish journey short but which to keep the remainder of e-ticket, in case you have a use for it later. So again you'd need away if telling you what's left to avoid confusion.

However, I appreciate why some would prefer one. So I guess a choice would be best.