Download the template in fillable PDF for free here 

Download the Robot Labels for kids here free

Make sure you visit  CreativeMamma.com for more free printables

Free Kids book labels no 1 from Worldlabel

Free Kids book labels no 2 from Worldlabel

Thinking about wedding labels? Having trouble coming up with ideas? Worry no more! We’re offering wonderful free fillable Wedding labels in PDF label templates for U.S. letter-size label sheets designed by Green Originals. Wedding Wrap around address label, Favor/thank you label card, 2 round monogram labels and another thank you label. The favor/thank sizes are universal and can be used as a wine label, card, as a label for tins for candy, candles, gifts and more…

6 wedding design sets available, each with 6 different types/designs. Each set in a downloadable ZIP file with the following type labels and Cards:
WL-7000 – Wrap around Label
WL-475 – Wine Label and/or Invitation (2 designs using this size)
WL-150 – Thank You Card

WL-350 – Monogram labels (2 designs using this size)

Each label available in Autofill and enter different information

Specs: These Wedding labels in PDF are cross-platform and application independent. They will work on Mac OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris and other operating systems. There can be compatibility issues among different PDF Readers. For optimum performance and full use of all functions, we recommend you download for free Adobe PDF Reader version 9.

Fonts: If you want to change the font type, size or color, (as well as bold, italics, etc.) select Control +E if you’re using a PC or Apple + E on a Mac. A toolbar will appear giving you additional text properties. Select “More” in the font properties toolbar for paragraph alignment and more.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE SET (Zip)

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE SET (Zip)

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE SET (Zip)

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE SET (Zip)

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE SET (Zip)

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE SET (Zip)

See more free Wedding Labels and also here

Visit Green Originals store at Etsy

Please head over to BlushPrintables and download your free Envelope Seal and Favor tag.

Despite the fact that open source has specialty label-and-business-card programs like gLabels and capable desktop publishing apps like Scribus, most general office users are going to continue to create their documents in the word processor of the office suite they feel the most comfortable in, like OpenOffice.org Writer. It is certainly a good choice, too; it provides design wizards that simplify creating print-ready documents for standard label templates, and OpenOffice’s mail merge backend is quite powerful.

by Nathan Willis

Basic design

To create a basic label or business card document, simply choose File -> New -> Labels or File -> New -> Business Cards. A configuration window will pop up, with several tabs for specifying things like page dimensions, label dimensions, text formats, and so on.

The Labels dialog has just three tabs: “Labels,” “Format,” and “Options.” In the bottom of the Labels tab is the template selector, so you can simply choose from among the dozens of pre-configured label sheets that Writer supports — including all of the standard Avery options, plus several other brands. If you so desire, you can choose [User] as your label type; this will require you to specify the size and placement of the labels manually in the Format tab.

 ”The New Label creation dialog, where you can enter standard text to be reproduced on every label, and choose from dozens of pre-configured label types.”

If you need to print a page of identical labels (such as return addresses), you can simply enter the text in the “Label text” field of the Labels tab. Last but not least, the Options tab allows you to create an entire page, or just a single label, placed anywhere on the template you desire. When you have your settings chosen, click New Document.

The Business Cards dialog is significantly more complicated. The “Medium” tab allows you to select existing templates, whereas the content of the cards is created on three separate tabs, named “Business Cards,” “Private,” and “Business.” The Business Cards tab holds several information templates, such as “Modern, with Name” or “Elegant, with Name, without Slogan.” These pre-sets create the sheet of business cards by pulling the specified information off of whatever you enter in the “Private” and “Business” tabs.

 ”The Business Cards dialog, which splits up personal and business data.  The actual card layout is defined by templates chosen in the ‘Medium’ tab.”

You do need to be sure that you select a business card template in the Medium tab, however — the Business Cards tab appears to have a drop-down selection box for creating business cards, but this only creates the pre-filled lines of information, it does not correctly lay out a sheet of cards. The Format and Options tabs offer the same choices as they do when creating label sheets.

“Writer’s business card layout — the basic design is pretty bare-bones, so you will probably want to customize it.  Note, also, the floating ‘Synchronize Labels’ window, which you can use for adjusting for blank lines.”

In either case, the new document that Writer creates is fully editable; using the wizards this way allows you to create a non-mail-merge document. You may still want to perform heavy customization of the page once it is generated. For this, you have all of the power of OpenOffice’s design tools, including embedding images and control over text, line, and background colors.

If you plan to make modifications to the text itself, however, you need to do so not by highlighting text and changing its font characteristics directly, but by using Writer’s Paragraph Styles. Right-click on any word on the page and choose “Edit Paragraph Style…” In the dialog box that pops up, you can fix any attribute of the text, from its font, to its spacing and indentation, to drop-caps, text flow and special effects. You will need to edit each card or label element’s paragraph style in this way; the styles tend to apply only to the particular field (e.g., Name). But by editing the paragraph style, you instantly change all of the cards and labels, without running the risk or overlooking one accidentally.

Finally, you may print your work directly or save it to a file. But if you plan to reuse the design, consider saving it as a template file instead of a regular document; this is especially important with labels, but could save you considerable work matching subsequent print jobs of any type.

Mail merge

The section above dealt only with all-of-one-kind document designs. By using OpenOffice’s built-in mail merge functionality, though, you can create and print merged label sheets with very little extra work. OpenOffice’s mail merge feature starts with the idea of “data sources,” which are general-purpose links to external data such as a MySQL database, a CSV file, or an address book application.

 ”OpenOffice.org’s data source functions allow you to tie in databases, address books, or spreadsheets — not just for mail merges, but for any purpose.”

The first step in printing a page of mail-merged labels, then, is to set up your address list as a data source. Open File -> Wizards -> Address Data Source; the dialog presents several options for the type of data source you are configuring (e.g., LDAP, Outlook address book, etc.). For a spreadsheet or a CSV file, choose “Other external data source” and click Next. You’ll be asked to specify the file to use and to further refine your source type (in CSV files, for instance, to mark which fields correspond to name, address, ZIP code, and so on). Finally, you assign a name to the data source; this name can be anything, and will be the name the source is listed as when you are performing the merge.

The label generation process starts the same for mail merges: choose File -> New -> Labels. However, in the Labels tab, you choose the data source you just configured, from the “Database” drop-down selector. Depending on the data source, you may also need to select a “Table” in the selector below. The available fields will be displayed in the “Database field” selector; simply choose each field in turn and click on the arrow button to add it to the Label text box in the proper order, adding line breaks or punctuation where needed. Also, be sure to select the “Synchronize contents” box in the Options tab.

“When defining an address data source for a merge, the most important step is assigning the fields correctly.”

When you click New Document, Writer will pull the data from the data source and create your sheet of labels. In the Print dialog, you can choose whether to print the entire sheet, or portions of it, on a label-by-label basis.

So far, there is no built-in functionality to assist in printing a mail-merged set of business cards, such as a full office might require, but you can do essentially the same thing by following the instructions for a label mail merge, set to a business card label template in the Labels tab, and importing your employees’ names and contact information.

Troubleshooting

The most common problem when creating mail-merged documents is stray blank lines, which are annoying in form letters, but can ruin a sheet of labels by messing with the alignment. Writer provides a technique for fixing blank line troubles, though it takes a few steps.

The key is to use paragraph delimiters between lines, not simple line breaks. The Label wizard treats line breaks as literal characters, but separate paragraphs as something that can be automatically removed. It is a distinction that isn’t made clear during normal editing, so in order to fix it, choose View -> Nonprinting Characters from Writer’s main menu. You’ll then be able to see which lines in your design end with a paragraph character: ¶.

Next, select View -> Field Names to toggle visibility of the fields in your document. They look something like <MyDatabase.Sheet1.0.Firstname> or <MyDatabase.Sheet1.0.Country>. For each field line that ends with a newline character and not a paragraph, click the cursor at the end of the line, then hit Delete, followed by Return. You should see the paragraph character appear, denoting the change. You only need to make these changes to the first label on the sheet; we can propagate it to the rest later.

When all the paragraph characters are in place, click at the end of each line, then choose Insert -> Fields -> Other. In the pop-up dialog, go to the Functions tab and choose Hidden Paragraph. In the Condition box, enter the name of the database field, but with an exclamation point at the beginning, such as ![MyDatabase.Sheet1.0.Firstname]. Now click Insert. This conditional test will hide the paragraph whenever the specified field is blank.

“The process for fixing blank lines is several steps, but can be done quickly.  In the front is the hidden paragraph function insert dialog; in the background you can see where the paragraphs are denoted by toggling Nonprinting Characters in the View menu.”

You do have to repeat this process for each field you need to suppress — though it probably won’t be all; most likely candidates for missing lines are the optional “Address Line 2″ or “Country” which are not necessarily present in every address. But whenever you’ve finished setting up your conditions, click on the “Synchronize Labels” button that floats in its own window, and your changes will be propagated to the entire document.

If you have trouble with this process, consult the OpenOffice users’ manual. It is a bit tedious, and hopefully will become a built-in feature in some future release, but it is easy enough to fix for now.

A considerably faster alternative to this process, however, is to use the custom-built label and business card templates provided at the Worldlabel Web site. The Worldlabel templates are built using OpenOffice Writer tables, and as a result do not suffere from the blank-line-suppression problem that the built-in wizard’s label sheets introduce. The files are OpenOffice Template (.OTT) format, and are cross-referenced by the Avery code number they fit. They are public domain, so they are free to use for any purpose. Read this howto on using these and customizing these templates.

Conclusion

The mail merge functionality built in to Writer is particularly nice due to the wide variety of database sources it supports. It can automatically tie in to address books like Thunderbird’s, KDE’s, or an office-wide LDAP directory, which saves you the trouble of manually updating the addresses. For repeat label sets, it is a good idea to save your work as an OpenOffice Template file, rather than as a saved document. This allows you to update the label information from the database automatically each time you make a new document.

Finally, if you are of the more right-brained persuasion, you may still prefer to work in Inkscape or Scribus to due the visual design work on your label or business card. But don’t overlook the time that OpenOffice can save you on the heavy listing: pulling address information in automatically. It is all free software, so you can do both. OpenOffice’s label printing features make a good time-saving complement to the other apps in a busy office environment.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Resources:

Openoffice templates

FastMailMerge extention

Mail Merge and Openoffice.org tutorial by Solveig Haugland

Create Labels with Openoffice howto at Tutorials for Openoffice.org

Free BookPlate Labels in fillable PDF label templates are printable on your laser and inkjet printer. Each book label design is an autofilll, which  allows  you to place your info in one label cell, hit tab and the complete template will populate with that info. These templates make your book labeling so much easier.

Use Worldlabel.com Product number WL-150 (Shipping labels, same size as Avery® 5164) to print.

Specs: These Book Plate labels in PDF are cross-platform and application independent. They will work on Mac OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris and other operating systems. There can be compatibility issues among different PDF Readers. For optimum performance and full use of all functions, we recommend you download the free Adobe PDF Reader version 9.

Fonts: If you want to change the font type, size or color, (as well as bold, italics, etc.) select Control +E if you’re using a PC or Apple + E on a Mac. A toolbar will appear giving you additional text properties. Select “More” in the font properties toolbar for paragraph alignment and more.

Clean Lines Template Download

Damask Template Download

Gingham Template Download

Modern Blocks Template Download

Buy all your Laser Labels from Worldlabel.com: as low as $10.45 per 100 sheets

Following is an excellent two part series on gLabels by Nathan Willis:  Getting started with gLabels and Advanced usage with gLabels.

Labels and Cards with gLabels (Part One)

In the world of label creation software for Linux, gLabels is the long-standing market leader. It offers a convenient graphical interface in which you can design labels with the same tools you are used to finding in image editing software, but it also supports business-friendly advanced features like “mail merge” and barcode generation. In addition to that, its focus on label creation offers some advantages in printing over general office or graphics alternatives, like simple control over printing partial sheets.

You can download source code for gLabels from its SourceForge project page, but most Linux distributions include it in their package management systems — the gLabels site maintains a list of such distros on the download page. gLabels uses GTK and is designed to work with the GNOME desktop environment, but it runs just as well under KDE.

When you first launch gLabels, most of the main window will be grayed-out; to get started you must first create a new label file. Click on the “New” icon on the toolbar. This opens the template selector, from which you can choose the type of media you want to work with — everything from address labels to CD labels to round labels to full-sheets to business cards are supported; gLabels includes hundreds of templates. To simplify selecting the right template, you can sort by brand name, page size, and media category using drop-down boxes at the top of the window.

“gLabels starts off a new session by asking you to choose a template.”

gLabels remembers your choices, so in subsequent sessions you can save some time by selecting often-used templates from the “Recent templates” tab instead of searching through the complete library. Also from this window you can click on the “Rotate” checkbox to open the label designer with the selected label rotated 90%. This is strictly for your convenience in designing the layout; gLabels does not require you to physically rotate the page in the printer when you finish — the program handles that automatically. If you’re not sure which orientation you need, there is a small preview displayed by the checkbox. You’ll notice that gLabels is smart enough to deactivate this checkbox if you choose a round or perfectly square label!

Designing

When you’ve found the right template, click “OK” and gLabels will open a new label in the label design window. This window has a drawing area on the left displaying blank canvas in the shape of the selected label, a properties pane on the right with which you can adjust design elements, and drawing tools above and below.

“The main gLabels window.”

Above the drawing area you will find the selection tool, text tool, rectangle, line, and ellipse tools, and the image and barcode tools. These function much like their equivalents in a vector drawing app like Inkscape or Illustrator — you use the object tools to draw content onto the canvas, and the select tool to manipulate objects already in the drawing. Unlike drawing in a raster editor like the Gimp or Photoshop, objects in gLabels are not rendered into a flat “painting” of pixels; they can be moved, edited, or erased at any time.

“The properties pane, showing properties for an image object.”

To the right of these drawing tools you will find the zoom controls (in, out, one-to-one or “100%”, and zoom-to-fit) and a button labeled “Edit merge properties.” The latter is for use when configuring a mail merge, and is complex enough to warrant a section of its own. The zoom tools, like the drawing tools, work just like those in any image editor.

Below the drawing area are controls for setting additional drawing properties: the font, size, weight, slant, and alignment of text elements, the color of text, line, and object fill, and the line weight. When no object in the drawing area is selected, changing any one of these settings changes its default for future objects. When you select a rectangle, on the other hand, the properties update to show its current line weight and color scheme — that way, you can manipulate all objects’ properties individually. A property that does not apply to the selected object (such as text settings for a rectangle or ellipse) is automatically grayed-out.

“The properties pane, showing options for text editing.”

The drawing area itself shows the outline of the current label, with a red border inside the edge marking a “safe area” into to which all critical content should fit, to account for printer variation and minor differences in label perforation. This border is actually part of the label template itself, so some templates may also include additional markup lines to help with alignment. The canvas also shows a gray grid underneath all drawing objects; this is strictly for visual alignment — gLabels does not “snap” to this grid. You can turn off grid display from the “View” menu.

“Additional controls, such as the z-ordering of objects, are not found in the toolbar.”

Working with objects and object properties

As you draw and manipulate objects in your design, the “properties” panel on the right changes to give you access to some more advanced controls for each object type. When inserting an image, for example, the properties panel is where you select the image file to load, and it allows you to adjust the scale, proportion, and placement of the image on the canvas with a greater degree of accuracy than the mouse can provide. The geometric objects (rectangle, line, and ellipse) have line width, color, and fill color controls in addition to size and position, and an optional “shadow” special effect over which you can control vertical and horizontal offset, shadow color, and opacity.

“The shadow feature is a built-in special effect.”

Text objects have their own set of properties, naturally — on top of color, size, position, and shadow effect. The “Style” tab allows you to select the font, size, weight and slant, alignment, and line spacing. You type the actual text to be rendered in the “Text” tab, which allows for more accuracy than trying to type directly in the drawing area, particularly when there are multiple layers and objects. Although it is probably clear, it bears mentioning that you control the properties of every text object you create individually — this gives you a lot of freedom, but it also limits you to a single text style for each object. If you need to italicize just one word, you will have to create it in a text object of its own.

You can place text, graphics, and other objects anywhere on the drawing area, including partially or completely off of the label itself. As you add elements to the design, the newest element is always placed on top of the older elements. You can change this “z-ordering” with the “Bring to front” and “Send to back” commands found in the “Objects” menu.

There you will find other object-manipulation commands as well; you can also rotate any object by 90 degrees in either direction, or flip it vertically or horizontally. Finally, you can select multiple objects (by holding down the Control key as you click on them) and align them vertically or horizontally, measuring from either edge or the center. You can also center any object on the label.

Printing your work

When you are ready to print your final product, choose “Print” from the File menu. You will notice that gLabels adds a “Labels” tab to the standard GNOME print dialog, with which you can better control printer output in some label-specific ways.

“gLabels adds a tab to the GNOME print dialog with special options, like partial-page-printing.”

For example, you can choose the “print outlines” option, and print test output on a standard sheet of paper. This way you can check the alignment of your printer by comparing the test page against an actual sheet of labels, without sacrificing a sheet.

You can also choose the “print crop marks” option, which will print light lines aligned to the outside of the template’s labels. Using these you can cut your sheets up, even with a paper cutter, without fear of slicing through your output. There are always occasions where you might want to cut up a sheet of labels, but this option is primarily of value when designing business cards. The crop marks let you create clean, perfectly-aligned cards without resorting to outlines or other tricks, and best of all: you don’t have to worry about aligning the crop marks; gLabels does it for you.

“gLabels allows you to view a preview of your printout to check for accuracy.”

The third option is “print in reverse,” which prints a mirror-image of the design. This option is for use with labels that will be affixed to glass, such as inside a window, but need to be read from the outside. Here again, you could manually achieve the same affect — gLabels lets you flip any object in the drawing area, remember — but by providing a one-click print-time option instead, gLabels allows you to worry about creating the design you want, not technical issues.

The last option gLabels gives you at the print stage is whether to print an entire page of labels, or just a few. The print dialog includes a preview image of the chosen template, with the labels to be printed highlighted. You can choose to print the entire sheet if necessary, or you can print as few or as many as you want. Just click on the template preview, or use the numeric spin-boxes to select which subset of the full sheet you wish to print, preserving the rest of the page for a different job, perhaps with a completely different design.

Up next: advanced topics

That covers basic gLabels usage: designing labels, using the built-in tools, and printing. Next time we will look into advanced topics that require more space: setting up your label designs for a “mail merge,” working with gLabels’ support for automatic barcode creation, and using the template designed to edit and create your own label templates. Until then, happy labeling!

Read Part 2:  Advanced usage with glabels - this covers mail merge, barcode generating and more!

By Nathan Willis

Printing laser sheet labels for the first time can be a daunting task or it can be so easy!!! Just fill out a template formated for labels in sheets with your information – just print, peel the labels and then apply them. But things can be difficult at first from formating a template, to choosing the right material or not knowing that the printer is causing the print quality problems. These are amonst some of the issues you can face.

Worldlabel is a manufacturer of PrintPeelApply™ brand blank adhesive Laser Label Sheets  for multifunctional labeling applications including address, mailing, shipping, CD and media labeling, as well as general business office labeling requirements. You can print, peel and apply our labels to almost any surface. Our labels are the same size labels formatted with the label templates you are currently using in your popular label software programs for Windows® Mac® and Linux programs.

Your DIY home and business projects for labels in sheets can realy vary: water bottle labeling, mail merge, TO and From labels and the list goes on and on. The main uses of labels, mainly enhancing the beauty of a product and/or sending a message by identifying items as clearly and as forcefully as possible is the goal of labels. The need to use different materials are available to help you achive this: Fluorescent colors, pastel colors, clear and glossy materials all with permanent adhesive. Clear glossy materials, Each label size also comes with a removable adhesive with a White Matte paper. We also offer a white weatherproof/waterproof label for laser printing in each size. Gold & Silver foil with a permanent adhesive for laser printing is available.

To help you go though the process of printing laser labels smoothly and creating the best laser label for you possible, we have published this paper on laser labels: everything u need to know. It  will help you understand laser labels for a to z  from choosing materials, choosing software,  to help solving all types of printer and alighment problems.

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Are you ever overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of open source software projects produced by the community? Even when looking at just a subset — such as graphics applications — if you are not already familiar with the options, the volume can make it hard to track down the application that fits your needs. The major categories tend to break down the same way, however — just a few major players; the large projects often catering to slightly different design goals, and a second set of smaller projects each of which has a smaller team and a more narrow focus.

Let’s examine each design field in turn. We’ll start by describing the leading program or programs in each, followed by the smaller or younger projects, and end with the special-purpose tools.

by Nathan Willis 

Drawing, Painting, and Illustration

Vector-based editors

• Inkscape is the dominant player here, a full-featured SVG editor with wide support for object manipulation, styling, text rendering, scriptability and SVG image filters. Inkscape supports the largest set of drawing primitives and effects.
• sK1 is an up-and-coming vector editor also aiming to be a complete illustration program. It is a fork of an older vector editor called Skencil that is no longer in development. One of sK1’s biggest claims to fame is import support for a large set of third-party file formats.
• Xara LX was a commercial vector editor that was released in a mostly-open source version for Linux in 2006. The company did not continue to develop it, though, so it may be a risky choice.
• OpenOffice Draw is part of the OpenOffice.org office suite, geared more towards crafting business-style illustrations suitable for embedding in other office documents than it is towards providing a complete suite of drawing tools.
• Even more limited in scope are the Dia and Kivio editors, both of which are designed for the purpose of building structured diagrams, from flowcharts to business diagrams. Dia is a GNOME application, and Kivio is a KDE application.
• Finally, the Ipe editor is a specialty tool designed for creating figures to be embedded in PDF or PostScript documents. Alchemy is an experimental vector editor that focuses on out-of-the-box drawing techniques including voice control and randomization. Neither are general-purpose editors, but may be useful if you fit their particular niche.

Raster-based editors

• Gimp is the long-dominant FOSS raster image editor. It supports multi-layered documents, with multiple color models, a full set of adjustable image-editing tools for photo and painting work, filters, channel operations, text and path tools, masks, editable brushes and palettes. It is fully scriptable, and has a large selection of third-party plugins that extend its functionality.
• Krita is another powerful raster image editor. Like Gimp, it supports tools and operations for both photo-adjustment and painting, layered documents, and filters. Krita, however, puts more emphasis on painting and drawing, by supporting multiple “brush engines” that simulate different media, some natural-media-simulation tools, and color models designed to better model painting. There is less emphasis on scriptability and plugins.
• MyPaint is a newer project that focuses exclusively on painting with pressure-sensitive pen drawing tablets. It boasts a massive array of brush options, all of which have completely adjustable behavior. However, it intentionally does not incorporate selection and image manipulation tools, preferring to leave that task for other editors.
• Nathive is a newer image editor designed for ease-of-use and extensibility with Python. It does not have a feature-set as complete as Gimp or Krita, but it is supposed to score high marks on usability with a smooth learning curve.
• Other general-purpose raster editors include Gogh, which is designed to simulate natural-media sketching and painting, Pinta, which is designed to be simple-to-use, and Tux Paint, which is designed for easy use by kids.
• A full list of the special-purpose raster editors would be prohibitively long, but there are actively-developed tools for creating all sorts of raster-based images, such as photomosaics (e.g., Pixelize), fractals (e.g., Mandelbulber or Fractal Miner) or 3-D stereoscopic pictures (StereoPhoto Maker). Many more special-purpose image tools have been adapted from stand-alone programs into Gimp plugins for ease-of-use, such as the G’MIC image manipulator, Resynthesizer texture simulator, or Liquid Rescale “content-aware resizer.”

Photography

Photo editing

• Although you can edit TIFF or JPEG photos in Gimp or Krita, for direct-from-the-camera professional quality work, you need a raw image converter. The most well-known raw converter in the open source suite is UFRaw, which is available as a stand-alone app or as a Gimp importer for the supported raw image formats (.CR2, .NEF, etc.). it supports multiple demosaicing algorithms, exposure and white balance control, denoising, and batch processing.
• Rawstudio is a virtually equally-capable raw converter, also with support for demosaicing, denoising, sharpening, exposure- and color-correction. The differences are that UFRaw typically includes more options for functions such as demosaicing, where there are multiple mathematical methods available. Rawstudio, however, includes more image browsing and cataloging features.
• RawTherapee is a newer entrant into the open source raw conversion world. It used to be a closed-source program, but was released as open source last year. It offers most of the same feature set as UFRaw and Rawstudio.

Workflow

• Free software does not have a dominant player in the photo-workflow application space. Many users prefer Digikam for photo management tasks; it supports EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata, geotagging, and is fully searchable. It also handles importing images from digital cameras.
• Two newer projects making big strides in this area are Darktable and Bluemarine. They have similar aims, enabling photographers to manage assignments and jobs, particularly to speed up processing of photos from a single shoot. Both are worth looking at, although at the moment Darktable is the more actively-developed.

Specialty

• Hugin is an important photography correction tool. Although it is often classified as a “panorama creator,” that is just one of its features. It can indeed align, stitch, and blend multiple photos into a seamless extremely-wide-angle or even 360-degree panorama, but it can also perform perspective correction, correct chromatic aberration and lens distortion, perform architectural projections, and combine multiple images in a “focus stack.”
• Luminance HDR (which was formerly named Qtpfsgui) is a tool designed to perform “tone-mapping” — compositing multiple exposures of one high-dynamic-range (HDR) scene into a seamless single image. Luminance HDR permits the user to select from multiple tone-mapping algorithms as adjust all of the algorithmic parameters for a variety of effects.
• Phatch is a rapid photo-manipulation batch processor. With Phatch, you create formulas by dragging and dropping operations (resize, perspective, shadow, rotate, etc.) into a stack, then execute it on a folder full of images all at once. The result is a much faster technique for performing multiple editing tasks than any interactive editor.

Design and Typography

Desktop publishing (DTP)

• Scribus is far and away the leader in open source DTP. It produces print-ready output, including the pre-press PDF/X standards, color management, font embedding and subsetting, and supports almost every type of image content imaginable. The page-layout system supports master pages, scripting, plugins, and embedding of content rendered by other programs, such as TeX or EPS.
• LyX is often referred to as a DTP application, but it is perhaps better described as a document preparation system. It uses the TeX typesetting system, but with an interactive GUI front-end more familiar to word processor users. Still, it enables the creation of complex documents like only Tex, LaTeX, and BibTeX can.
• PDFedit is a tool designed for editing what would normally be a read-only file type, finished PDFs. PDFedit has a considerable learning curve, but can be very useful for working with legacy documents when nothing else will do.
• gLabels is a specialty application built specifically for laying out and printing sheets of labels, business cards, and other small-sized designs that typically rely on multiple-copies-per-page templates. It can be used to generate sheets of identical content, or to “mail merge” content from external documents.
• Laidout is a design tool created by an independent comic book publisher to handle placing and rearranging multiple pages on to large sheets of printer paper, even reordering pages and with support for folding-and-cutting requirements. The interface can be hard to learn, however, as the project tends to reflect the individual developer’s needs.

Web design

• Bluefish is the most common web design tool in the free software community, but even it offers less in the way of WYSIWYG visual layout tools than commercial products like Dreamweaver. However, if coding straight HTML is not for you, Bluefish can make the process easier, and keep better track of CSS and JavaScript functions than a web-based content management system can.
• Kompozer is an older web design tool with its roots in the Mozilla project — the code originated as an HTML editor in the Mozilla Suite before Firefox and Thunderbird were split off into separate projects. Like Bluefish, it is a mixed bag of design tools and code editing, and it does not receive as frequent updates as Bluefish.
• More and more web design tools are migrating into Firefox extensions. Web Developer marks up browser content (including HTML entities and CSS) and allows manipulating elements “live” in the page. Firebug helps edit and debug CSS and JavaScript. Pencil is a rapid prototyping tool for creating designs in the browser. There are many more; searching for lists compiled by developer site is the best way to find current information.

Typography

• Fontmatrix is the leading font inspector and manager. It allows you to activate and deactivate fonts from your running system, search for specific glyphs, render sample text, and manage your font collection by type and by user-defined tags.
• FontForge is the leading font design and editing program. It can create TrueType, OpenType, and Type 1 fonts, with full control over features like kerning, hinting, and diacritics. You can edit existing fonts with FontForge, or create new fonts from scratch.
• Fonty Python is an older font manager than Fontmatrix, and although it does not seem to be as actively maintained, it is still a good tool, particularly if you have trouble with some of Fontmatrix’s bleeding-edge features.
• There are several special-purpose tools to assist the font designer, such as Glyphtracer, which simplifies converting raster images to the outline curves needed by FontForge, and Xgridfit, which helps create TrueType hints. Specimen is a lightweight tool for inspecting fonts with user-defined sample text.
• Finally, although it is not an app itself, the Open Font Library deserves mention in this category, because it is a large resource of fonts available under open licenses — meaning you have the legal right to alter and extend them, which is not the case with most commercially-purchased fonts.

Modeling and Animation

3-D modeling

• Blender is the dominant 3-D modeling tool in open source, consisting of a full toolchain for producing professional-quality photo-realistic scenes. On the modeling side, it permits meshes, subdivision surface modelings, Bezier and NURBS, and 3-D sculpting and texturing (including UV unwrapping). It scriptable with Python, and for output can use a variety of shaders and renderers, complete with ray-tracing, ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, and radiosity.
• FreeCAD is the most well-known 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) app in open source. It is designed with mechanical engineering in mind.
• Archimedes is a simpler CAD program that specializes in architectural modeling. The QCad program does not directly do 3-D, but its 2-D design tools can be used to create blueprints useful in other, 3-D capable CAD tools.
• Several other open source 3-D modeling programs are under active development, including Art of Illusion and Wings3D. Neither has as large of a development team or user community as Blender, but since they do not try to incorporate Blender’s animation tools (see below) and video editing workflow, they may be easier to learn.
• There are also several special-purpose tools that come from the Blender community designed to assist with specific tasks, such as MakeHuman, which is optimized for the tricky task of creating realistic models of human beings.

Animation

• In addition to its static modeling and scene rendering, Blender is also a 3-D animation program, supporting rigging, skinning, armature deformation, forward and inverse kinematics, motion curve and key-frame editing, and more. Recent versions also support particle and fluid physics, soft body solvers, hair and cloth, and other special effects. A timeline based video editor and compositor are built-in.
• Synfig is a vector-based 2-D animation studio that supports many of the same features Blender does, but for 2-D animation. Characters, backgrounds, and other scene elements are composed of vector graphic primitives which are drawn or adjusted in key frames, and automatically “tweened” to create smooth animation frames.
• Pencil (not to be confused with the Firefox add-on mentioned above) is a more traditional “cell-based” animation tool; each individual frame is drawn on the canvas, which can be overlayed with translucency (called onion-skinning) to assist the artist.

Utilities and system support

Scanning

• Xsane is the leading scanning tool for open source systems. It fully supports flatbed, transparency, and film strip scanners, offering complete image controls and previewing, automatic or manual calibration, and color management complete with ICC input profiles.
• Kooka is a scanning utility written for the KDE desktop environment. It uses the same driver backend as Xsane, but attempts to put a more easily-understood front end on the tools, and integrates with other KDE-based applications.
• Due to the complexity of Xsane and Kooka, several “simple” scan tool projects exist as well, notably Scan Tailor and Simple Scan. None of them add functionality over the more complex offerings; they focus instead on a quick-use interface.

Printing

• CUPS is the printer management project used by almost all open source graphics systems, supporting inkjet, laser, and other less-common printer types. CUPS handles scheduling jobs, spooling and network-printer sharing. Support is usually provided by the operating system, so you do not need to worry about installing or configuring it separately.
• Gutenprint is a high-quality printer driver project; it provides the printer control layer directly below CUPS, and provides drivers for a vast array of printers. Normally you would never need to update or configure Gutenprint directly, but if you have trouble with a specific printer, it is the project to look towards for updates.
• Though CUPS and Gutenprint provide a solid printing system, there are several specialized projects that target specific tasks. Photoprint is designed to create professional-looking photo layouts, complete with borderless multiple-image-per-page layout options. CMYKTool from the same developers allows greater control over CMYK color separations than most individual printer drivers provide. The aforementioned Laidout can be used to create complex print layouts, including splitting large images up into arbitrarily-arranged multipage mosaics.

System calibration and profiling

• LPROF is the most widely-known ICC profile creation tool in open source, largely because it is currently the only tool with a graphical user interface. It was written by the creator of LittleCMS, the color management library used by most of the graphics applications mentioned above. LRPOF can create profiles for monitors, scanners, and digital cameras. Several hardware devices like X-Rite’s DP92 are supported.
• Argyll is a color management system (CMS) that includes several command-line tools. Included are utilities to create device profiles, calibrate displays, link profiles, and transform raster images to different color spaces. A GUI project called dispcalGUI also exists, maintained by different developers.
• Oyranos is another CMS, one that notably includes tools to configure and assign ICC color profiles to X displays. The ICC Examin tool is an offshoot of this project; it is the only dedicated color profile previewer for open source graphics pros.

Other tools

• Apart from the main applications, there are several important utility programs that act more as functional assistants than as content creation tools. Leading the charge is Agave, a color scheme chooser. The interface is lightweight, but the program lets users build color schemes based on complements, split-complements, triads, and other scheme types, with adjustable palettes and brightness/saturation controls.
• Swatchbooker is a newer “swatch” tool, which can read color swatches from a wide variety of programs, including the Adobe creative suite, all major open source programs, web sites, and many proprietary products. You can then convert and save swatch files for use with other applications.
• Open source support for pressure-sensitive graphics tablets is robust, but the historic need to edit the configuration of the devices in text files led to the creation of Wacom Control Panel. It is a graphical tool that lets the user tweak and adjust the settings and sensitivity of these devices on-the-fly.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Are you moving soon and need help with organizing all your cartons and boxes? Do you need printable moving or storage labels to help you to identify all your valuables? Or, maybe you need to keep everything in storage for a while and — in this case — you really do have to have everything labeled. No worries!  We’re offering a free fillable Moving Label Kit for you to download. It is a PDF  template and the printable labels are in US letter size sheets.

Included in the Moving Label Kit: master list, fragile labels, this side up labels, customize tags for each room, To and From, beware glass, shipping label size and more……..

Label sizes to use:

• For fragile labels use our Shipping Labels size 3.5 x 5″
• Shipping Label Autofill Template use Shipping labels size 4 x 3.33
• For To and From label Autofill Template use our Shipping Labels size 4 x 3.33
• For the Tags use our Shipping Labels size 4 x 1″
• For Handle with Care Glass use our Half Sheet Label 8.5″ x 5.5″
• Or your can just print it out on paper, cut and use tape to stick -:)

Specs: This Moving Label Kit  in PDF is  cross-platform and application independent. They will work on Mac OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris and other operating systems. There can be compatibility issues among different PDF Readers. For optimum performance and full use of all functions, we recommend you download for free Adobe PDF Reader version 9.

Fonts: If you want to change the font type, size or color, (as well as bold, italics, etc.) for the To and From and Shipping Labels, select Control +E if you’re using a PC or Apple + E on a Mac. A toolbar will appear giving you additional text properties. Select “More” in the font properties toolbar for paragraph alignment and more.

Tips:

• Make sure the Highlight Tab is on
• Use the Scroll Downs to choose room or custom enter your info

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE MOVING LABEL KIT

“Choose which room using the scroll down or custom enter”

“Use our Wl-5100 size, keep track of all your fragile items from each room”

“Use the scroll down to choose which room and the tag the carton. You can also customize an entry”

RESOURCES

Moving Blog @About

Moving tips

Start to finish guide at Lifehacker