Example 3: Address Labels Using the Evolution Addressbook

Our last party was a great success, and now we need to print mailing address labels for the invitations to a new one. To simplify this, we can use the Evolution addressbook, because the address data of all our friends is stored there.

Depending on how your copy of gLabels was packaged, this option could be unavailable. Support for the Evolution addressbook will only be available if the evolution-data-server and its development files were present when gLabels was built. Please keep this in mind if you build gLabels directly from source.

If the gLabels package from your distribution lacks this support, you may wish to contact the package maintainer or file a bug against the package to request it.

In glabels we have created a new gLabels document using the Avery 5512 "Address Labels" template. Next we use the Objects ▸ Merge Properties menu item to display the Merge properties dialog. We use this dialog to select the source type (in our case Data from default Evolution addressbook) as shown.

Once we have chosen Data from default Evolution addressbook as our merge source, we will get a full list of its content. Initially, all entries are checked. Assuming we were planning a really big party, we could leave this selection untouched (but let's keep our budget in mind). We will now select or unselect certain entries by clicking on the appropriate checkboxes, or we could use the Select all and Unselect all buttons to activate or deactivate all entries in the address book.

We can also view each entry in more detail by clicking on the appropriate expander (the little triangles) as shown. Once we are satisfied with the selections in this dialog, we will click the OK button to accept the changes.

Now we start adding objects to our glabels document as shown.

In this example we have a single text object again. This text object contains all of our merge fields organized on multiple lines as a mailing address.

Now we can print our address labels by selecting the File ▸ Print menu item. This will display the print dialog as shown below.

Just to make sure our labels are going to look okay, we select the Print outlines option and click Print Preview. This will display a print preview dialog as shown below.

Everything looks good, so we can now load up our printer with the appropriate label stock, print our address labels and start mailing our party invitations.