Founded in 2016 by a student and theater director duo, Ludus is a company made for thespians, by thespians. Ludus is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company based in Holland, Michigan which has grown to support more than 4,500 organizations in creating incredible experiences for venues across America, providing solutions in ticketing, marketing, fundraising, volunteer management and much more.

The primary solution Ludus provides is digital ticketing. However, Ludus also prints physical tickets for their clients who desire a more analog ticketing experience. Physical ticket printing is carried out through the industry standard BOCA printers, which do not ship tools for ticket creation. Instead, designers configure tickets in FGL code, a highly technical language that is over 15 years old, and with matching development software. Ludus’ vision is to bring FGL into the modern web-based world.

Our Web-Based FGL Ticket Emulator ushers users into that bright future, through easing the creation and design of tickets, with the ability to preview designs prior to printing, which was never possible before. It provides a clean interface familiar to users of other technical languages, including features such as syntax highlighting, automatic text prediction, error checking, validation and, most importantly, instant ticket printing.

The emulator also supports real-time previews of the ticket as it is being edited as well as access to the whole corpus of FGL features. These include 13 different fonts, barcodes and various layout adjustments. With access to all these features, ticket design time is reduced from hours to minutes.

The application runs as a web app built with React, separated into a parsing package which validates the FGL code alongside a high-performance rendering package written in TypeScript using low-level HTML5 canvas API calls for precise, fast output.