Another Christmas with Labels
Another year, another set of Christmas labels to print. If you recall, my wife likes the labels to families to be printed to “John & Jane Smith” or “The Smith Family”, depending on whether the recipients have children. Thus, it is not a direct export from Address Book and needs to be scripted.
In previous years, I used an AppleScript that I wrote to dump the information to an AppleWorks database and use its label printing tools from there. I no longer have AppleWorks installed, so I needed to find another way to automatically print labels to my wife’s standards. The latest version of Office for Mac is very AppleScript-friendly, but I grew frustrated trying to figure out how to dump the content to an Excel spreadsheet. Then I read a review about Mail Factory, which is a dedicated labels and envelopes solution. It imports from a comma separated text file, so I just rigged my old AppleScript to dump its values to TextEdit. This worked marvelously.
While playing with Mail Factory, I noticed that it has the ability to display an address as “John and Jane Smith” or “The Smith Family”, which can be set separately for each address imported. The application is AppleScript-able, so I may take the time to re-write my script to have Mail Factory import directly from Address Book and set the label’s content appropriately. This would cut out the middle step of writing a text file.
