[wplug] Best app for printing on Avery Labels?

[John Harrold]

Sometime in November Russ Schneider assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| I have a database of mailing addresses and I wan't to print them out on 
| a particular Avery label sheet.
| 
| What's the best (IYHO) app in Linux for this?  I think Open Office does 
| this, and I even wrote a PHP app that would read a SQL DB and generate 
| PDF's of proper proportion, but I'm looking for something better.

i'm a big fan of latex. there seems to be a package for making sticky
labels. if you have latex installed (it comes with most distros), run 

$ locate labels.dvi

and view that file with xdvi.

for an example, see this file from ctan:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/labels/test/avery5162.tex

to compile that use the following script::

<mklatex>
#!/bin/sh
fname=avery5162
latex $fname.tex &&
dvips  -t letterSize -Ppdf -G0 -f $fname.dvi >$fname.ps &&
ps2pdf13 -sPAPERSIZE=letter $fname.ps $fname.pdf &&
rm $fname.ps &&
dvips -f -G0 $fname.dvi >$fname.ps
</mklatex>

this will give you a pdf and a ps file.

it looks pretty simple, you can configure it to take an input file with
addresses separated by blank lines. for example, put the addresses in a
file named 'bob.tex'. using the avery5162.tex file above, replace the list
of addresses with \input{bob}. 


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