Subject: envelopes, mail merge, etc. (was Re: Feature request.)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue May 01 2001 - 13:39:14 CDT
At 11:43 AM 4/30/01 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
>On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Daniel Lawrence wrote:
>> Greetings AbiSource community!
>>
>> I have a feature request (duh the subject). I think that an envelope
>> generator with connectivity to a program like gnomecard, would be a good
>> feature to add to the list. I would do it myself except I believe this
>> project is done in C or C++ and regrettably I am a post Windows Basic
>> programmer.
>
>There are two options for doing this. We can do it with our perl scripting
>functionality or with our hopefully soon-to-be completed bonobo bindings
>via an external script in an arbitary programming language (maybe even
>Basic :-)
>
>Unfortunately both require at least a Unix environment. I would like
>envolope printing myself. It is likely to be available to Gnome users well
>before Windows users.
I'm not familiar with gnomecard, but it seems like there may be as many as
four orthogonal features on the table here:
1. Envelope-sized pages. We currently have support for a number of various
page sizes. Adding more to the code should be quite simple, once a developer
knows what the dimensions of that page are.
2. Printing envelopes with the document. If your printer supports manual
feed and/or swapping paper trays, it would be nice if you could keep
envelopes and their associated documents in the same file. (Ditto for
portrait and landscape pages.)
The current page size implementation was done at document scope, so all
pages in the document must be of the same dimensions and orientation. We
should eventually move that information into section-level CSS-like
properties, but so far nobody's signed up to do so. Once that's done,
there'll need to be a bit more work done in the page drawing and
viewport-sizing code, but that won't be hard. (In fact, I left TODO
comments at most of the necessary spots.)
3. Mail merge. For this feature, you lay out a document of some sort with
placeholders (usually fields) and other text. Then you link those
placeholders with an external database of names and addresses, generating
one copy per record in the database.
4. Automating some or all of the above under external control. This is
where embedding and scripting work comes in. As Martin points out, the only
exploratory work done on this so far (via Bonobo and Perl) is still pretty
Unix-specific.
Paul
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