From Suzee Que Flickr photostream taged labels “Free to Use only, For your Art only, For your personal use only, not for Sale on a CD or Collage Sheet”.

Label with form field Highlighted

Label with text added > ready for printing

A very special thanks to  Suzee Que for making these great vintage labels designs available.  Please visit her photosteam at Flickr and check out some of her great artwork.

Specs: These full page sheet templates are downloaded as cross-platform PDF files, which are 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.

Tips: Printer settings vary from user to user. To test your label layout, first print the labels on plain paper and trace over the label sheet to test for alignment. One solution to alignment problems: select “More” in the font properties toolbar > then paragraph. Also, please make sure the highlight tab is on.

Sizes: Our WL-125, same size as Avery® 5162 or our  WL-150, same size as Avery® 5164

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-150, 4 x 3.33″, 6 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-150, 4 x 3.33″, 6 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-150, 4 x 3.33″, 6 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-150, 4 x 3.33″, 6 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

Download Different Info | Download Autofill (Use WL-125, 4 x 2″ label, 10 labels per sheet)

“Free to Use”, For your Art only, For your personal use only,  not for Sale on a CD or Collage Sheet”

Once again, a very special thanks to  Suzee Que for making these great vintage labels designs available.  Please visit her photosteam at Flickr and check out some of here great art work.

Visit Worldlabel.com for all your labels

Specs: This full page sheet template 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.) 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 FULL SHEET LABEL TEMPLATE / NOTEPAD

FOR USE AS A NOTEPAD

For all types of functions including a typewriter, sticky notes and more go to Tools > comments and markups. for typewriter > Tools > Typewriter > show typewriter toolbar.

FOR USE AS A TEMPLATE FOR FULL SHEET LABELS

Full sheet labels is one of the most popular size labels. There uses are widespread from drum labels, shipping labels to book covers, warning signs and any thing else one can think of or need. They are usually sold in a matte white paper with a permanent adhesive. Full sheet labels are also available with a removable adhesive, in colors, clear, waterproof for laser and inkjet printing, silver and gold foils, glossy materials and more. Our pricing for 100 sheets of full sheet labels in white matt is $10.45. As the quantity increases the price keeps getting lower and lower.

Our name badge labels (same size as Avery® 5395) in Matt White Paper is designed to be run through laser printers, inkjet printers and copy machines. Name badge labels are  white uncoated labels that utilize a premium face stock and provides a striking foundation for a clearer, sharper image. We use a specialized acrylic adhesive that is formulated not leave residue. But even better, we have glossy, clear, color and even gold and silver foil materials to help you enhance the beauty of your name badge. Maybe the event is outside, and if that is the case, we have weatherproof / Waterproof materials also.

Of course there is always a moment you in a hurry to make your own name badge labels. The simplest way is by using our fillable PDF templates, either in Autofill with same information, or inserting different information.

How to use PDF Fillable Label Templates:

Specs: These 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 AUTOFILL | DOWNLOAD DIFFERENT INFO

Other Templates for name badges:

Openoffice.org name badge template

• MS Word Template
• PDF Template
• EPS Template

Businesses shut down. Productivity slows to a halt. Shopping malls are so full of people they’re bursting at the seems. These are just some of the ideas brought to mind as the end of the year approaches and a new Holiday Season is upon us.

A source of stress, at times, the Holidays can also be a time of togetherness and unity for people. Clip art images by liftarn (above) and bloodsong (below) beautifully demonstrate how simple and effective imagery can articulate these same feelings.

Vector graphics have also been stylistically implemented by mcol’s Christmas tree in the spirit of the Holiday Season.

The Open Clip Art Library is always evolving and welcomes contributions from everyone around the world.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

Regular internet users know that RSS feeds can significantly reduce time spent finding new content on your favorite web pages.  With this influx of content flooding users’ RSS Readers, content producers must find ways to attract new subscribers and keep them reading.

While valuable content is the surest way to accomplish this, the importance of catching a reader’s eye cannot be ignored.

Raulxav has demonstrated other ideas for RSS icons, and I encourage you to consider ways in which you might catch a reader’s attention.

Visit the Open Clip Art Library to learn how you can contribute.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

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

Use Worldlabel.com Product number WL-125 (same size as Avery® 5163) to print.

Visit here For Halloween Address labels

Specs: These PDF Halloween labels 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.

Different Info |  Autofill

Different info | Autofill

Different Info | AutoFill

Different Info | AutoFill

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

A device that allows blind people to attach and read audio labels on everyday objects has gone on show. The PenFriend uses minute barcodes which – when scanned by a digital pen – trigger MP3 files recorded on the unit.

The PenFriend has been developed by a UK firm together with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).

It costs less than £60, and can be used to label foods and medication as well as clothing, personal documentation and film and music collections.

“At the moment we are just scratching the surface: we are starting development of address books, organisers, diaries and calendars,” explained Alison Long of the RNIB.

The PenFriend is the result of collaboration between the charity and London-based company, Mantra Lingua. It uses optical identification technology (OID) to print microdots on to adhesive labels which are then read by the scanner in the tip of the PenFriend.

Read More at  BBC