Formatting Allergens for Food Ingredients

Product level info

This section applies to Loftware Designer Pro and PowerForms Suite editions or higher.

The European Union’s mandatory food labeling legislation, formalized in Regulation (EU) No. 1169/2011 not only specifies what information must be shown, but also how that specific information is presented, including font, color and contrast. The regulation deals in detail with font size, but leaves the exact type of allergen highlighting to the user. The ingredient allergens must be printed using a font that distinguishes them from the rest of the list (such as bold, italic, underlined, inverse, different color).

Loftware offers a built-in support for allergen formatting using custom functions. These are predefined functions that you can use to highlight the allergens in the list of ingredients. To highlight them, you can use bold, italic, underline, CAPS formatting or combination of this formatting. The function result is RTF-formatted data you can use with the Rich Text Box object.

The allergen word might appear inside a certain ingredient that is not categorized as an allergen. In this case you can use the "WithExceptions" type of functions. These functions will accept another input parameter – a list of exceptions. These are words or sentences that must not be formatted even if they contain the allergen word. For example, if you define the word "milk" as allergen, it will also be highlighted in the ingredient "coconut milk", which is incorrect. You can define "coconut milk" as an exception and Desktop Designer will not highlight the word "milk" when used in combination "coconut milk".

Note

For samples and additional how-to documentation see Loftware Food and Beverage labeling.

Prerequisites

The Food Allergens functions connect to the provided data source and read the included allergens. To open the data source, the appropriate database drivers (ODBC drivers) must be installed on the computer.

  • For Excel and Access data sources. If you have Microsoft Office installed on the same computer, you already have the database drivers. If not, install the drivers separately. Visit Microsoft Download Center to download and install Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable or Microsoft Access 2013 Runtime.

  • For MS SQL data sources. The ODBC driver has been released within the Microsoft SQL Server Feature Pack. You must have installed support for the provider SQLSQLNCLI11. Visit Microsoft Download Center and download the driver.