Akkana Peck’s Gimplabels is a set of scripts for the Gimp image editor that make creating labels and business cards a snap. A .tar package is available on the Web site, but the contents are simply a Gimp script named labels.scm and the utilities needed to rebuild labels.scm. Gimplabels was originally written for an older version of the Gimp, so if you are using the current revision (2.6) and it doesn’t work, try the rebuilding instructions inside the package. You should be able to install the script by copying it to the /scripts/ directory inside your Gimp configuration folder (i.e., /home/username/.gimp-2.6/).

When installed, Gimplabels adds new functions to the File -> Create -> Misc menu and to the Filters -> Combine menu. Under File -> Create -> Misc you will discover two options: Labels -> Rect Label and Labels -> CD Label. Both of these scripts create a new image for you in the exact dimensions required for the particular label you are creating.

The Rect Label script offers a list of several dozen common label templates in pop-up menu. The CD Label script allows you to choose either standard (5-inch) or mini CD (3-inch) formats. Both scripts allow you to adjust the background color and the size of the new image if you need to tweak for an exact fit. Currently, only US letter sized paper is supported.

To make rectangular labels, you create the new image as described above, then, once you’ve drawn your label, you run the second script: Filters -> Combine -> Make label page. This script takes the label image you have been working on, duplicates in the proper number of times, and lays out a new image populated for a full sheet of the selected label. You’ll notice that the same drop-down list of label templates is available here; you can run the second script on a different label template than the one you designed with, but this is not recommended.

To make CD labels, start with File -> Create -> Misc -> Labels -> CD label. This will create a new image suitable for use as a CD label: a disc with the proper diameter, with the center punched out. As with rectangular labels, once you have completed your design work, Gimplabels can automatically convert it into a label sheet. Select Filters -> Combine -> Make label page. The tool can compose label sheets compatible with Neato, Stomper, or other name-brand label sheet layouts.

Advanced usage and settings

The “Create label sheet” script has a few options, but you should familiarize yourself with them in case you need to fine-tune the settings. For example, the “Printer fudge factor” scales the image slightly to account for the fact that different brands and models of printer have slightly different printable areas.

The “From:” and “To:” settings allow you to generate an image that only prints on part of the whole sheet. So if you only need for labels, set the script for “From: 1″ “To: 4.” Next time, you can print “From: 5″ “To: 8″ or whatever number is appropriate. Note that you have to specify a continuous sequence, starting in the upper lefthand corner. There is no way to skip a label in the middle.

Gimplabels works part of its magic by depending on the GUI label designer gLabels. gLabels’ database of known templates is the source of the list that appears in the label creation and label sheet scripts. These are usually stored in /usr/share/glabels/templates. If you update gLabels and acquire a new template, you will have to run an auxiliary setup script in order for Gimplabels to re-scan the directory and pick up the new template.

This script is called make-label-fu.py, and is included in the Gimplabels .tar package. It needs Python and PyXML to be installed. Run it from a command line with “python make-label-fu.py”. You do not have to run make-label-fu.py or even have it installed on your system — at the project’s home page you can also choose to download just the labels.scm script by itself. gLabels has a very complete set of templates, so updating the database is probably not something to worry about unless you know of a specific new template that has been added to the list.

Gimplabels is about as easy as it gets; no guesswork is involved when creating the new image to the exact specifications required, and the script composes the sheet without your intervention — all you have to worry about is designing one label the way you want it.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Other resources:

gLabels – EZ label creator for Linux

http://oplnk.net/~ajackson/software/maillabels/

Glabels

Openoffice.org Labels Templates

Printing Avery Labels in Linux

LabelNation

Visit Worldlabel.com for all popular size labels

Virtually any photo manager out there lets you perform mundane tasks like adjusting contrast, adding a watermark, or applying effects to your photos. But even the most powerful applications like digiKam or F-Spot can’t really help you when you need to perform the same action (or a sequence of actions) on dozens or hundreds of photos. For those tasks you need a batch processing utility like Phatch. This nifty tool can perform no less than 35 different actions on your photos, and its user-friendly graphical interface makes it easy to create advanced multi-step batch rules (or action lists in Phatch’s parlance).

If you are using Ubuntu, installing Phatch is as easy as downloading its .deb package and double-clicking on it. If you want to be able to view EXIF and IPTC data, you should also install the python-pyexiv2 package, and for a “cool nautilus integration” Phatch’s Web site recommends installing the python-nautilus package. Unlike conventional image editing applications, Phatch doesn’t allow you to edit photos directly — instead, you use it to set up actions. An action in Phatch is a single operation that the application performs on the photos that are fed into it. Each action offers a number of options: for example, the Scale action allows you to specify the width and height, resolution, and resampling algorithm. You can add as many actions as you like, and the project’s wiki ( http://photobatch.wikidot.com/actions) provides a list of all actions supported by the Phatch.

To add an action to Phatch, press the Add Action button and select the desired action from the list. You can narrow the list to a specific action type by selecting a category from the Select drop-down list. Alternatively, you can use the Search feature to search for a particular action. In this case, choose the Scale action and press the Add button. This adds the selected action to the main window, and you can use the available options to tweak the action.

For the Scale action, for example, you can choose to scale down the photo by a specified percentage value or to a predefined size measured in pixels. If you wish to change the image resolution or resampling algorithm, you can do so by adjusting the appropriate options. Once you are satisfied with the settings, you can add the next action and specify its options. In a similar manner, you can add other desired actions.

Finally, you have to add the mandatory Save action: without it, Phatch wouldn’t know where to save the processed photos. Besides options such as output format and quality, the Save action also offers a set of variables that you can use to specify a destination for the processed photos. For example, using the default <folder>_phatch/<subfolder> variable, Phatch saves the processed images in a separate folder inside the source directory. The <root>/phatch/<year>/<month>/<day> variable, in turn, creates a directory structure based on the current date. By the way, you can rearrange the actions in the list using drag-and-drop. This, of course, doesn’t apply to the Save action that must always be the last action on the list.

To process photos using the created action list, press the Execute button, choose the directory containing the photos you want to process, and press the Batch button. You should then see the processed photos in the destination directory. While using the Execute command every time you want to run photos through Phatch is not that difficult, the application offers another nifty feature that makes the batch process even more straightforward. Choose View -> Droplet, and Phatch turns into a floating icon. Drag photos onto it, and Phatch processes them using the currently opened action list.

Although Phatch is first and foremost a GUI tool, you can run it from the command line, so you can automate the batch execution and put Phatch to some interesting uses. For example, you can turn your computer into a batch photo processing server, and you can find a more detailed description of how this can be done at Phatch’s wiki .

By Dmitri Popov

Designing a sheet of labels is a straightforward process with Scribus: you import the proper template, lay out one label the way you want it, then duplicate your creation to fill the rest of the slots on the template. To get the best results, however, you will need to make use of some specific Scribus features: layers, text styles, and export options.

Start by downloading a template of the label or card sheet you need. Scribus can import EPS and PDF (among other formats); EPS is simpler, so if in doubt, try it first. Within Scribus, create a new document of the appropriate page size (paying particular attention to landscape/portrait orientation). You can set the margin guides to zero for all four sides when creating a new document; you won’t need regular page margins because the template already dictates where the content will go. Once Scribus opens your new blank document, visit the “Page” menu and check the “Snap to Guides” option — this will keep everything orderly when making multiple copies of your layout.

Now choose “File” -> “Import” -> “Get Vector File” from the menu bar. Choose the template you downloaded in the file browser; the mouse cursor will change to a folded-newspaper shape to indicate that wherever you click on the page, the imported file will be placed. Click in the upper-left-hand corner of the page. You are likely to miss the absolute corner by a few pixels; just open up the Properties window from the “Windows” menu. This important palette allows you to view and adjust all sort of content properties in your document. The “X, Y, Z” tab features geometry: you can manually set the X and Y position of the template to 0 for a precise fit.

Next you should add some horizontal and vertical guides to help keep things in position. Create a new guide by clicking in the rulers above and beside the workspace and dragging in to the image. By zooming in, you can very precisely position your guides to exactly fit the label locations of your template. Finally, choose “Windows” -> “Layers” from the menu bar. The Layers window allows you to create and shuffle multiple layers in your document, just as many image editing programs do. The just-imported template is in the default layer “Background;” click on the plus button to add a new layer — in which you will create your content without fear of accidentally bumping the template out of the way.

DESIGN!

Now you can get to work, adding text, lines, shapes, and images to your label design. Text, naturally, is the most important part of the design: if it is not readable, the postal service will not deliver mail, contacts won’t be able to read your phone number, employees won’t know what is stored in what file, and so forth. Nevertheless, Scribus can make your cards or labels look good in addition to being functional.

Let’s start by working with images. Choose “Insert” -> “Insert Image Frame” from the menu bar, or click the “Insert Image Frame” icon on the toolbar. You can click and drag the image frame anywhere on the page. You can grab the side or corner handles on the frame and resize it. Right-click on the frame, and from the context menu choose “Get Image,” then find the image file you want to insert.

Once you have selected your image, look at the Properties panel. In addition to the “X, Y, Z” tab, the “Shape” and “Image” tabs give you some important options. Shape allows you to change the shape of the frame (e.g., rectangular, round, etc.) and set text-flow, so that text content flows automatically around the outside of the image instead of overwriting it. Image gives you more exact control over the size and dimensions of the image display; here you can precisely adjust the positioning of the image within the frame (such as to crop off the top), adjust the horizontal and vertical scaling, and change the DPI setting — an adjustment that will only affect the final output, of course, not the preview that you work with in Scribus itself.

Lines and shapes are just as important as images in many professional designs. You can have Scribus create a wide variety of line styles, and adjust their width, endpoint behavior, and color. Shapes are graphical elements like lines, not layout elements like image frames. The vast majority of the time, you will use shapes to insert solid-color or gradient rectangles, but Scribus can render all sorts of polygons, stars, arrows, and flowchart-like graphics as well.

To make a simple gradient, click on the “Insert Shape” toolbar button, then draw a rectangle on your label. You will notice that it is solid black, unlike the transparency of an empty text or image frame. Here again, you can turn to the Properties palette to adjust the shape to fit your needs. In this case, the “Colors” tab comes into play; from there you can change the line and fill color of the rectangle. The drop-down box allows you to switch between solid color and seven varieties of color gradient.

When you have designed one label to your satisfaction, copy and paste it into all of the other slots of the template. The best thing to do is to select all of the graphical elements at once, then hit Crtl-G to group them together. Thus when you make copies, you can move the copies together without accidentally getting any elements misaligned via a stray mouse click. The guide lines you created earlier will make sure everything is aligned perfectly.

TEXT WITH STYLE(s)

With the background and graphical elements of your design done, create a new layer in which to edit the text elements of your work. Make sure that your text layer is the topmost layer.

For basic text, all you have to do is insert a text frame: choose “Insert” -> “Insert Text Frame” from the menu bar. To edit the contents of the frame, click on the “Edit Text” button or choose “Edit” -> “Edit Text” from the menus. What pops up is the Story Editor, a light-weight word processor that makes it easier to work on the copy inside even if it is to be displayed in a small font or wrapped around some irregular graphics.

More importantly, the Story Editor allows you to use paragraph styles. You can highlight individual words or phrases and change their typeface, size, and character style in the Story Editor, but for text that you will re-use — as on a sheet of labels or cards — using paragraph styles makes making adjustments far easier.

The left-hand column of the Story Editor is a drop-down menu where you can choose the style of the adjoining paragraph. Left-click on it and choose “Edit Styles” to bring up the Style Manager. If you only plan to use one font element, you can stick with editing the Default Paragraph Style, but if you have a company logo, address, and potentially other text that you want to keep distinct from one another, use the “New” button to create a style for each.

Now, instead of altering the font size, spacing, color, and other details of the text in the Story Editor, change them in the Style Manager, then select the updated style in the drop-down box in the Story Editor. You can quickly see the advantage of this approach if you drag the Style Manager out of the way of the document window and use the “Apply” button to make changes to the selected style: your changes will be updates instantly in the document. Thus you can systematically increase or decrease the font size until it fits, adjust the colors, or test out different type faces, all with a few simple clicks.

It might not seem like a tremendous advantage while you work on a single label, but try this: select all of the text frames, and make duplicates of them for the rest of your sheet. Now you can see how much simpler it is to use styles: change the paragraph style once, and all of the copies are updated.

EXPORT LIKE AN EXPERT

Once your text is in and formatted to your satisfaction, pause and think for a second about printing. When printing a sheet of cards or labels, you don’t want to print the outlines of the PDF or EPS template that you imported in the first step. In some instances you might want to print both the graphics and the text, but in other situations you might not. Return address labels, for example, will all be the same. For other labels you might want to print the graphics all at once (perhaps on the nice, full-color printer), then print one or two labels at a time with different text.

Luckily, because you placed your template, graphics, and text in different layers, Scribus makes it simple to do so. Bring up the Layers window. There are five checkboxes next to each layer in the list, allowing you to individually control whether the layer is shown on screen (helpful for tweaking highly complicated documents), printed, locked or unlocked (to prevent accidental changes), subject to “text flow” around objects from other layers, and displayed in full or in wireframe mode. Uncheck the “Print Layer” box for the templates layer, and the outlines will not be printed. To print a stack of labels with the graphics but no text, uncheck the text layer. Later, you can re-check text and un-check graphics to print addresses without doubling-up on the graphics.

Clearly, if you only want to print a single label, you will have to have more fine-grained control than at the layer level alone. For each object in the document (frame, shape, or even group), you can individually disable or enable printing via the “X, Y, Z” tab in the Properties window. The toggle button depicts a printer, just as it does in the Layers window.

Finally, when you do print from Scribus, you should know about a few of the program’s helpful options: the Preflight Verifier, Collect for Output, and PDF compatibility. The Preflight Verifier is a built-in “sanity check” that scans your document and alerts you if there are any suspicious problems, such as empty image frames, objects that stick out beyond the page, and text that overflows from its text frame. You can always choose to ignore these errors and print anyway, but they are helpful for catching accidents.

Collect for Output (found under the “File” menu) creates a folder for your document and copies all of the graphics and other external sources into that folder so that they remain together. This is especially helpful for working with teams, but it can also be used to make sure that you do not open a document one morning to find that an important logo was deleted from some different folder and you now have no backup.

If you are printing directly to a printer, your output will be handled by PostScript, but Scribus can also export documents as PDFs, with a wide range of options. Specifically, you can choose the amount of image compression, which can affect final output quality, and you can specify font embedding. If you embed the fonts in your document into the PDF, you can be sure of its final printed appearance, but you will increase the size of the file itself, perhaps significantly. Luckily, with PDF you don’t waste any paper, so a little trial and error can help you perfect your design and layout.

By Nathan Willis

Other resources:

gLabels – EZ label creator for Linux

http://oplnk.net/~ajackson/software/maillabels/

Glabels

Openoffice.org Labels Templates

Printing Avery Labels in Linux

LabelNation

Visit Worldlabel.com for all popular size labels

When you open a photo using the Open button, Fotoxx automatically sets the folder in which the photo is stored as the working directory. You can then use the Previous and Next buttons to open other photos in the directory. The Index button opens a simple photo browser that you can use to view your photo collection as thumbnails and browse it using the available navigation buttons.

The main toolbar provides quick access to Fotoxx’s image editing features. The Tags menu, for example, contains commands that let you assign one or several tags to the currently viewed photo (the Edit Tags command) and search photos by their tags (the Search Tags command). The Basic EXIF Data and All EXIF Data commands allow you to view useful photographic data stored in the photo, including camera model, exposure, ISO value, shutter speed, etc.

The Retouch menu offers commands that can help you to tweak your photos. The Red Eyes command lets you quickly fix the red eyes problem that often occurs on portrait photos, while the Brightness/Color command can be used to adjust brightness and color settings. The latter command combines several functions in one dialog window, and you can use it to tweak color balance, saturation, and brightness. Better yet, you can adjust these and other parameters only for specific parts of the photo by either adjusting the curve with the mouse or using the preset buttons. All adjustments are applied to the photo in real time, so you can immediately see the results of your tweaking. Of course, you can always undo the changes or reset the sliders by using the appropriate buttons.

Fotoxx also includes tools essential for basic photo editing, including Trim (Size -> Trim) for cropping photos, Rotate (Size -> Rotate) for rotating photos, Sharpen (Sharp -> Sharpen Image) and Reduce Noise (Sharp -> Reduce Noise) for improving image quality. None of these tools are particularly sophisticated, but they get the job done with a minimum of effort. The only niggle here is that the Trim tool lacks a cropping with aspect ratio, which would have been useful for quickly cropping photos to fit a specific photo paper size.

Fotoxx also includes the Unbend Image tool (Bend -> Unbend Image) which can come in handy to adjust perspective on the photos — a problem that often occurs on pictures of tall buildings. But the crown jewels of Fotoxx’s tool set is the HDR and Panorama features. The former is a sort of poor man’s HDR tool that allows you to combine two photos with different exposures into a single image with improved visibility of detail in both the darker and brighter areas . The entire process of creating an HDR image is fully automated: select the directory containing source images, and Fotoxx takes care of the rest. Usually, the application does a pretty good job of combining the images, but it also gives you a chance to tweak the final result by adjusting the brightness settings.

The Panorama feature makes Fotoxx a decent tool for stitching multiple images into a panorama. But before you can make use of this feature, you have to adjust two parameters: lens_mm (focal length) and lens_bow (barrel or pincushion distortion). You can do this either manually or let Fotoxx try to guess the optimal values. No matter which way you choose to go, make sure you read Fotoxx’s manual that provides a detailed description of how this can be done. The good news is that you have to set the lens parameters only once. After that, creating panoramas couldn’t be easier. Select the two images you want to stitch together, and use the mouse to align them. Press the Proceed button, and Fotoxx stitches the images. Add other images and repeat the procedure.

Fotoxx is like a pocket knife: it won’t replace your ordinary tool box, but it can be an indispensable tool for quick fixes here and now. Even if you find the basic editing tools in Fotoxx a bit limited for your taste, the Panorama tool alone makes it a good addition to your digital photography tool box.

By Dmitri Popov

Scribus is the leading open source solution for desktop publishing (DTP); it supports professional features like press-ready color separations and PDF output, as well as every media file type under the sun. With Scribus you can design high-end documents with a separate workflow for authors, photographers, and graphic designers in an office environment, but it is easy enough for single-user work, too. The latest release, 1.3.5, just hit the Internet, and packs a suite of new features. If you have never taken Scribus for a test drive, now is the time.

You can download Scribus installers for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows from the project’s Web site. Version 1.3.5 boasts major improvements in OS X compatibility, for the first time integrating completely with the native windowing and menu systems, which should encourage many Mac owners who found earlier releases not quite “Mac-like” enough to blend in.

If you’re familiar with proprietary DTP applications like Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign, you should have no trouble navigating Scribus. If you’re used to building (or trying to build) documents in a word processor, however, you’ll save a lot of time by glancing at the Scribus project’s documentation. In a nutshell, DTP apps like Scribus focus on laying out the different parts of a document as separate pieces. Where you want text, you put in a text frame, when you can then move about and resize at will. Where you want an image, you drop in an image frame. It’s a little different, but it gives you a lot more control than the tab-based spacing and pagination that are the limitations of a word processor — if you want two columns in Scribus, you simply put in two text frames side-by-side, exactly where you want them.

Mailing labels are a good example of documents that take advantage of DTP’s highly structured approach. You can design a simple label layout with ease, then duplicate it for an entire page’s worth for easy printing; the result is much easier to work with and make changes to than the same layout in a word processor.

DTP basics

For example, open Scribus and create a new document. Even better, download a template and open it. Scribus can read PDF, EPS, OpenOffice, and several other formats. Microsoft Word support is spottier but possible; select an application-neutral format like PDF if you have a choice to get the best results. Scribus will import the PDF or EPS template page as an image; this is what you want because it allows you to lay out text elements against the template as a background.

Add vertical and horizontal guide lines around the labels by clicking the mouse in the rulers outside the page and dragging the guides into the window. These will help align text and image frames. Zoom in on the upper-left-most label. Now you can add text by clicking on the Insert Text Frame button, or by choosing Insert Text Frame from the Insert menu. The cursor will change shape to resemble the Insert Text Frame button; click it anywhere and a dialog pops up allowing you to specify a width and height — to accept the default values, just hit Return.

The result is a transparent frame with handles on all four sides and in each corner; you can drag it around and resize it at will. To actually edit the text that goes in the frame, click the Edit Text button in the toolbar. What pops up is akin to a word processor screen, with all of the font and formatting choices normally provided. The advantage to Scribus’s DTP approach is that you can edit the text and worry about the layout separately.

To add an image, use Insert Image Frame, either from the menu or toolbar. You will notice that image frames are filled with an “X” when empty to distinguish them from text frames. From the right-click context menu you can choose Get Image to load an image into the frame. Scribus does not actually embed the image file into the Scribus document; this is another DTP standby — by keeping the files separate, artists can make updates to the images without the page designer having to re-import everything.

Naturally, you can add as many images and text frames as you like, and re-order them with layers. You can also create graphical elements directly within the page, such as bezier and freehand lines, polygons and shapes. Almost every attribute of any shape or frame is editable from the right-click menu or from the floating Properties palette. By controlling each page element separately, you have total freedom over the layout.

When you are finished designing one label, select all of the elements and choose “Group” from the Item menu; this will tie the elements together so that they can be moved or copied as a single unit. You can then copy and paste as many as needed to fill up the page. And because Scribus intelligently tracks which items are used in the document, you can re-use the same image as many times as you want without the Scribus file growing any larger.

Going further

Of course, this is only the beginning of what Scribus can do. It really excels at multi-page documents, where you can link text between text frames so that it flows through columns and across pages, around graphics, and more. In this example, the two main text boxes are linked, so that the copy — here, “greek” text automatically generated by Scribus — runs continuously through them. That facilitates easy re-arrangement on the page. The puzzle-piece graphic is overlayed on the left-hand column, but as the Properties window shows, the text is set to flow around the outside edges. Elsewhere on the document you see examples of different image types, lines, and other graphical elements.

On top of these long-standing features, the new 1.3.5 release adds several interesting capabilities, including “render frames” — frames for which the contents are created by an external program, such as a 3-D scene, LaTeX formatted formulas, or even typeset music — transformation and path-editing tools like those found in dedicated vector graphics editors, and image effect filters that you can apply to pictures within Scribus without altering the original file.

Scribus also sets the bar among free software applications in its support for the PDF standard. No longer just for Web downloads, PDF is rapidly becoming the format of choice for professional print shops, thanks to its exacting specifications for images and fonts. Scribus supports PDF 1.3, PDF 1.4, and PDF 1.5 output options, and the “demanding” PDF/X-3 specification that tailors the format for press-ready documents.

Speaking of compatibility, Scribus 1.3.5 also adds important features to allow users to work with documents created in other applications. Scribus can now import vector illustrations created by Adobe Illustrator, and can import color palettes created in applications like InDesign — including the popular proprietary Pantone color-matching system.

by Nathan Willis

Visit Worldlabel.com and check out the selection of Labels for laser and inkjet printers

Ever tire of laying out a sheet of address labels in OpenOffice.org or Word templates when you’re in a hurry? Karl Fogel’s LabelNation may be able to help. It is a small free software tool that whips out printer-ready label layouts from the command line. All you do is put the addresses in a plain text file and run LabelNation; the output is a standard PostScript file. And it’s not just fast; as a command-line tool it is easily integrated into scripts or other automated workflows.

Of course, If you interested in a dedicated label software program for linux, we highly recommend gLabels and read our howto…

LabelNation is written in Python. You can download the latest package from the project’s Web site. The package includes the labelnation executable (which will run on any platform with Python installed), plus instructions and a folder full of examples. LabelNation comes pre-configured to handle more than 50 different standard label sheets from Avery and other manufacturers, but you can also specify your own layouts if needed.

Basics

Basic usage requires calling the labelnation script with five arguments: labelnation -t labeltype -l -d "delimiter" -i inputfile -o outputfile. For example, labelnation -t avery5661 -l -i addresses.txt -o mylabels.ps.

The -l switch tells LabelNation that the input file contains lines of text (it can also take PostScript input for more complex variations by substituting the -c flag, but this is for advanced users). The label types available for -t include standard 4- to 80-label-per page layouts on both letter sized and A4 paper. LabelNation will print out a complete list of available options if you run labelnation --list-types.

The delimiter specified by the -d switch tells LabelNation what separates the addresses between the labels in your input file. So if you use —- as a delimiter, your input file might contain:

Jerry Seinfeld
123 Fake Street, Apt 5E
New York, NY 10201
USA
—-
George Costanza
456 Faker Avenue
New York, NY 10211
USA
—-
Cosmo Kramer
123 Fake Street, Apt 5D
New York, NY 10201
USA

… and so on; you would then call LabelNation with -d "----" as an argument. As you can see, the address text is indented; this is to allow you the flexibility to place addresses as close to the edge horizontally as you see fit — you can add as much or as little as you like, which can be handy if you will be printing labels with a pre-printed border or logo. Other than spacing ans the address delimiter, no special formatting is required of the input. LabelNation supports the Latin-1 or ISO 8859-1 character set, including all of the accented characters. It also automatically adjusts the font size to fit the label type specified by -t.

Tips

If you are new to LabelNation, the program allows you to get used to spacing and other formatting issues with the optional --show-bounding-box switch. This will produce output with a black line outlining each label; that way you can print a sample sheet and adjust your spacing before printing your final labels.

If you find that your labels are consistently misaligned with LabelNation’s output, perhaps due to printer feed differences, you can easily adjust the margins LabelNation uses with the --bottom-margin and --left-margin arguments. First, run labelnation --show-parameters for the label type in question. For example, labelnation --show-parameters -t avery5661 returns:

LeftMargin: 11
BottomMargin: 16
LabelWidth: 270
LabelHeight: 72
HorizSpace: 20
VertSpace: 0
HorizNumLabels: 2
VertNumLabels: 10
FontName: Times-Roman
FontSize: 12

If the left margins are too small, simply try adding a few points by adding --left-margin 32 to your command.

You don’t have to print a full sheet of labels at a time, either. If you only have a few to print, you can reuse a partial sheet of labels and tell LabelNation where on the sheet to start printing with --first-label n. The count starts in the bottom left-hand corner and goes up column by column, like so:

4 8 12
3 7 11
2 6 10
1 5 9

… reflecting the number of labels in the specified type.

Advanced usage

Despite all of the flexibility described above, LabelNation is capable of doing much more if you are willing to learn. First of all, you can create your own label types if the labels you need to work with are not in the predefined list. All you have to do is create a text file containing the parameters of your label sheet, in the plain-text format reported by LabelNation when you call the --show-parameters switch. The margins, label width and height, and spacing are all measured in points. With your file saved, just tell LabelNation to use it with the -p flag, such as labelnation -l -i myinputfile.txt -o myoutput.ps -p mynewparameters.txt

The more adventuresome should explore the -c flag, which tells LabelNation that the input file contains PostScript, not plain text. PostScript is a complex and powerful language, but the LabelNation Web site reports that users have had success through trial and error with creating graphics and other features using -c.

Finally, like most good command-line utilities, LabelNation can be used in scripts to automate label generation. For example, you could export names and addresses from your address book to plain text files, then write a bash script to quickly produce printer-ready mailing labels from them with LabelNation. Even better, you could specify a dash as the output file argument (i.e., -o -) — that tells LabelNation to send its output to stdout. You could pipe that output directly to the printer with labelnation -t avery5661 -l -i myinput.txt -o - | lpr … and print your labels directly, without the intermediate PostScript stage.

By Nathan Willis

Other resources:

http://oplnk.net/~ajackson/software/maillabels/

Glabels

Openoffice.org Labels Templates

Printing Avery Labels in Linux

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By now, you’ve probably discovered how delightful the Firefox Web browser is to use while surfing or working on the Internet. One of its best features is that it’s easily customizable by using add-ons to add extra functionality. Here are 10 favorites that make getting things done a little easier, more efficient, and fun.

In business, time is money and all the time you spend doing the same repetitive tasks while browsing can really add up. SmarterFox makes life easier – and quicker – by speeding up the things you do every day, like launching favorite Web pages and searching Wikipedia right from the sidebar.

These days, it’s not uncommon to do business with people all over the globe. Overcome language barriers and avoid any potential gaffes with BabelFish Instant Translation. This easily customizable add-on converts single words or large blocks of text with one click. It also provides backwards translation to double-check text for correctness.

Xmarks is quickly becoming one of the top bookmarking add-ons out there. Use it to keep bookmarked Web pages and passwords synchronized across all the computers in your office so you can access them from anywhere. Xmarks also keeps an eye on bookmarking activity around the Internet and lets you know what other people find interesting and useful.

Tired of typing the same signature at the end of every email? There’s no need to re-type your name and all your contact information each time when you can just use WiseStamp. It’s a nifty add-on that lets you create multiple signatures for your Web-based email accounts. You can even add IM and social profile info, or your company logo.

If you use Google Calendar to schedule and manage appointments, you’ll definitely want to try Better GCal. It adds a collapsible sidebar to the your onscreen calendar, colors your weekend days, shows week numbers, and even has skins to make it more visually appealing.

Speaking of Google, if you’re one of the millions of people who use Google Reader to stay on top of the news, here’s a standout add-on worth a look. Google Reader Watcher keeps track of all your unread news and displays how many there are right on the status bar. You can even open Google Reader right from the sidebar, and allow the extension to login to your Google account automatically.

Lots of businesses use Facebook to promote themselves and keep in touch with current customers. If you have a presence on this popular social networking site, it’s important to make sure you maintain an ongoing dialogue with other people who use the service. This handy toolbar add-on designed by the Facebook development team will notify you when you have messages or friend requests on the site, and lets you share interesting Web pages you’re currently browsing with a single click.

If you receive a lot of documents online, you know what a hassle it can be to open them for viewing. Open IT Online lets you open 18 different types of documents and images without downloading any special software. All you need is a free account with Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, or a similar online service and Open IT Online will connect and open it for you. It even tells you ahead of time what size the file is so you can decide whether you want to open it at all.

Security is everything these days and with all the potential problems associated with Web browsing, it pays to be extra safe. Secure Login integrates with Firefox’s native password manager to prevent malicious code from stealing your login data. It also helps protect users from phishing attempts and works well on computers with multiple users.

All work and no play makes… well, you know the rest. You’ve got to take a break every once in a while so, when you do, click on this neat little add-on and play Pacman for a few minutes to unwind. It’s got four different speeds (Slow, Normal, Fast, and Insane) and has the same look, feel, and sounds as the popular game you remember from when you were younger. Have fun!

Illustration 1: Brazilian President Lula da Silva dons an ODF hat. Credit: paulohenrique.net (Flickr)

President da Silva toured the conference floor, gave a public speech in the general conference hall to the thousands assembled there, and later gave a smaller address to a private group which included Free Software movement founder Richard Stallman, Free Software community leader Jon Maddog Hall, Brazilian Free Software community leader Pablo “spectra” Lorenzzoni, former Brazilian IT head Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira, Hewlett Packard Open Source Director Bdale Garbee, and Red Hat Vice President Michael Tiemann.

According to Free Software community leader Jon Maddog Hall, who sat in the front row for da Silva’s speech, the Brazilian President’s remarks lasted about 15 minutes, and was delivered without a teleprompter or prepared notes, which tends to indicate that Free Software is a topic with which he is personally familiar. President Da Silva’s speech to the conference has been translated into English here, and the video for his speech is available on YouTube in three segments, here, here and here.

In his speech, President da Silva spoke of the need to create Brazilian IT initiatives and for greater independence from Microsoft. He said that Free Software would provide Brazilians the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to create high tech jobs on par with other countries, a step that he felt would enhance Brazilians’ image of themselves:

“We’re discovering that we can do a lot of things. We´re discovering that nobody is better than us. Maybe equal, but not better: they don´t have more creativity than us. What we need is an opportunity.”

Brazil is the fifth largest nation in the world by both population and land mass, and is the largest economy in the Americas south of the Rio Grande border between the US and Mexico. The fact that the head of state of an important country like Brazil lent his symbolic clout to Free Open Source Software is a digital tipping point, a sign to Brazilians, to proprietary companies like Microsoft, and to world leaders elsewhere that Free Software is ready for mainstream adoption. As a consultant to businesses weighing the adoption of Free Open Source Software, Jon Maddog Hall had this to say of President da Silva’s speech:

Just as Obama’s election reset the expectations of young black people in the United States, Lula’s speech reset the campaign for Software Livre (Software Freedom) in Brazil and everywhere else. Now when students want to use Free Software in their classes, they can point to Lula’s speech and say that Free Software is important. When government employees want to use Free Software to solve a problem, and their boss says to ‘use Microsoft’, the employees will have a new argument to use. And as I go around the world talking to government leaders, university presidents, and company owners, I can point to this speech on YouTube and say ‘This is what the president of Brazil had to say about Free Software.’

Indeed, heads of state typically use their office to highlight matters of national and international importance, so the mere fact that President da Silva took time out of his busy schedule to make an appearance at a Free Software conference signals that there are more weighty issues at stake than whether Free Software makes better technological tools than some competing proprietary vendors, such as Microsoft for example.

In particular, President da Silva spoke about the importance of Free Open Source Software in closing the digital divide. As with government officials of the Spanish state of Extremadura, President da Silva spoke of the Free Software movement as being an important part of a broader digital inclusion movement aimed at bringing the benefits of technology to economically disadvantaged Brazilians. Whether Free Software makes a better mousetrap than Microsoft is not a question really worthy of the attention of a head of state. But the question of how a government can most efficiently deliver the benefits of 21st century technology certainly is topic deserving the attention of a head of state. At least President da Silva thought so.

President da Silva also signaled the importance of Free Software to his administration by addressing conference organizer Marcelo Branco by name and by attending a more intimate gathering of Free Software leaders. Free Software leaders obviously have access to the Lula administration.

If your laptop is getting long in the tooth, there is no reason to rush out to buy a new one. Instead, you can relegate the most demanding computer tasks to your desktop machine and use your laptop to run applications remotely. This solution (often called the server/thin client model) has several advantages. The obvious one is, of course, that you can give your old laptop a new lease of life without spending money on memory or hard disk upgrades. Moreover, since all your documents and files are stored on your desktop computer, you don’t have to worry about keeping your data on different machines in sync.

To accomplish the magical transformation of your laptop into a powerful workhorse, you need to do two things: you have to install and configure a VNC server on your desktop computer, and set up a VNC client on your laptop. VNC is a system that allows you to control a remote computer as if you were sitting in front of it. And if you run the VNC client in full screen on your laptop, it’s almost impossible to tell that you are controlling a remote machine. VNC is not the fastest system of its kind, but it is very easy to configure and straightforward in use. And if you run it on your home network, it is fast enough for most tasks.

Installing and configuring the VNC server

Figure 1. Enabling the Remote Desktop feature on Ubuntu.

If you are running Ubuntu or Kubuntu on your desktop machine, turning it into a VNC server is as easy as it gets, and you have several options to choose from. On Ubuntu, the quickest solution is to use the built-in remote desktop feature. Simply choose System > Preferences > Remote Desktop, tick the “Allow other users to view your desktop” and “Allow other users to control your desktop” check boxes. In the Security section, tick the “Require the user to enter this password” check box and enter the desired password into the Password field. Before you close the window, note the command you can use to access the desktop (it looks something like this: vncviewer localhost:0). That’s it: close the window and your server is ready to go. This solution, however, has some drawbacks. Notably, it doesn’t have any configuration options, meaning you can’t customize it in any way.

Figure 2. Installing the TightVNC server.

A better solution is to use a dedicated VNC server software like TightVNC (http://www.tightvnc.com/), one of the most popular and feature-rich VNC implementations out there. TightVNC is available in Ubuntu repositories, so you can easily install it using the Synaptic package manager. Choose Applications > Add/Remove and press the Advanced button to switch to Synaptic. To locate TightVNC, click on the Search icon, enter “vnc” in the search field and press OK. In the list of found packages, select tightvncserver, right-click on it, and select Mark for Installation. Click on the Apply button to install the package. Alternatively, you can install the TightVNC software from the command line using the following command:

sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

Figure 3. Installing the TightVNC server from the command line.

Once TightVNC is installed, launch The Terminal program (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and run the “vncserver” command. You will then be prompted to enter access and view-only passwords. Once you’ve done that, you should see a line that looks something like this:

New ‘X’ desktop is localhost:1

This indicates that the TightVNC server is up and running with display number 1. Unlike GNOME’s built-in Remote Desktop feature, TightVNC allows you to specify several important options such as display dimensions and color depth. Why is this important? Let’s say the display on your desktop machine has a 1024×768 resolution while your laptop can only manage 800×600. If you run the TightVNC server using the default settings, you end up with a display image that doesn’t fit the screen of your laptop. To prevent this from happening, you can set the TightVNC server to run in 800×600 mode using the -geometry option:

vncsever -geometry 800×600

The same goes for color depth. If your laptop can only handle 16-bit color depth or you want to speed things up a bit, you can set the TightVNC server to run in 16-bit color mode using the -depth option:

vncserver -depth 16

Of course, you can combine both options:

vncserver -geometry 800×600 -depth 16

Using the VNC client

Now that the VNC server is up and running on your desktop machine, you have to take care of your laptop. No matter what Linux distribution you are using on your laptop, chances are it has VNC client software already installed. For example, if you are running Xubuntu, which perfectly suits older hardware, you can launch the VNC viewer using the “vncviewer” command. If the vnc client is not installed, you can easily do that by executing the following command:

sudo apt-get install xtightvncviewer

Alternatively, you might want to consider installing a lean and fast Linux distribution like Damn Small Linux DSL for short–which will turn your old laptop into a speed demon. In fact, you don’t even have to install DSL at all: since it’s a live CD Linux distibution, it can happily run off the CD. This also means that you can use your laptop even if its hard disk is dead. Boot your laptop off the DSL CD, click on the VCNViewer icon to launch the VNC client, enter the IP address of your desktop machine followed by a colon and the display number, and you are good to go.

Figure 4. Laptop with Damn Small Linux running OpenOffice.org off the server.

by Dmitri Popov

When the third largest city in Germany rebuffed Microsoft, even people in the US were talking about it. The Munich city council’s decision some years ago to gradually banish Microsoft software from City Hall computers made news in American newspapers. In the meantime, while the software revolution has quieted down, the change goes ahead with zeal. And other governmental authorities have now dialed back use of Microsoft software. But Microsoft is not conceding the field without a fight. “We are learning,” says Microsoft manager Andreas Hartl.

“We would do it again,” said the vice director of the Munich project, Florian Schießl. Pictures of penguins, the Linux mascot, adorn the walls of the Munich city IT department. By mid-2012, at the latest, 80 percent of the 14,000 computers in the city administration will be moved to be Linux. Even much earlier, by the end of this year, all City Hall employees will be leaving Microsoft Word, Excel and Microsoft Internet Explorer and moving to free software, such as OpenOffice and the open-source Firefox Web browser.

In the short-term, no money was saved with the change-over. To the contrary, the city had to absorb one-time upfront costs of 13 million Euros for the Linux Munich “LiMux” project, which the city’s IT department describes as an IT evolution, not a revolution, as some observers thought. According to vice director Schießl, an upgrade of the then-existing Windows NT4 operating system to Windows XP would have been as much as two million euros cheaper. The change-over will make financial sense only after several years, by avoiding the payment of on-going licensing fees.

In the meantime, others have followed the Munich example. The Foreign Office and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), as well as several other cities, have placed their trust in alternatives to Windows, Word and Excel. Microsoft is unexpectedly finding itself out in the cold. “Microsoft certainly must have thought that the city of Munich’s only consideration was how to go about purchasing licenses for new Microsoft software,” says Schießl.

But the city administration had a different question in mind: “How much are we going to allow ourselves to become dependent on one manufacturer?” Echoing the primary concern of the open source community, Schießl explains that free software certainly “Does not mean free as in free beer.” Instead, open source offers programmers the advantage of improving the software and expanding additional applications without having to get permission from a specific company. This advantage also carries weight with other municipal governments. That is why the cities of Mannheim, Schwäbisch Hall and Treuchtlingen in Bavaria are moving at least partially to free software.

“The Munich decision has not led to masses of other city governments following Munich’s example,” says Microsoft manager Hartl, although he concedes that Microsoft has meanwhile been making efforts to open its Windows platforms for free software. Even Richard Seibt, of “Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF) finds that Microsoft is now heavily engaged in open source arenas. “They are serious,” he says.

[Note: this article is a translation of an article written in German by reporter Michael Kieffer and published in Heise On-Line on 2009-06-24. You can read the original article in German here: http://bit.ly/u4tRk]

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