glabels: Label, business card and media cover creation program
April 13th, 2007 edited by AdelieEntry submitted by Dave Seff. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !
gLabels is a program for creating labels and business cards. It is designed to work with various laser/ink-jet peel-off label and business card sheets that you’ll find at most office supply stores.
This application is a gem of a program for anyone who want to create their own business cards, address labels, CD Labels and covers, and much more. It has an extensive database of label and sticker formats for most major brands of labels such as Avery, Neato, and Memorex. It also has a template creation feature which allows for custom labels and designs. For this example I will explain the basics on how to create a set of business cards.
When you choose new from the file menu, you are presented with a list of various standard label sets. I chose Avery 5871 Business cards as that was what I had purchased from the store.
From here you can start designing. You can place and format text, images, and basic shapes to your liking. Don’t worry about needing to duplicate these to cover the entire sheet of labels. gLabels knows to print the entire sheet as per the template used. Once you are satisfied with your design, just send it to the printer once you have loaded it with the store bought labels.
As you can see the interface is quite simple to use. Editing labels is simple and straight forward. News, updates and support can be found at the gLabels homepage, http://glabels.sourceforge.net/.
gLabels is written for the Gnome desktop environment but just like most Linux applications, it will run under any window manager. KDE has a similar application called kbarcode. The name is misleading however it does provide the same functionality. It does not seem to be as straightforward as gLabels, but it does support batch printing if you are mass producing labels for commercial use.
gLabels has been available in Debian since Sarge, and in Ubuntu since Warty.
April 13th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
i wouldn’t call glabels “straightforward” as i had to peak into the help file to figure out a thing or two, but apart from that it was easy to use. i also like its simple/clean aesthetics.
one thing i never figured out: can multiple labels be entered manually? i needed to print three labels to three different people and i wanted to type them in manually to glabels, but it appears glabels only allows one “template” so i had to resort to batch printing. so in the end i had to essentially type four addresses instead of three: one template in glabels and the addresses of the three people into gnumeric (as i figured that was easier than creating three different labels/templates in glabel’s gui).
so i figure glabels is meant for batch printing (print one label multiple times or one template with multiple addresses). i just wanted a professional addressed envelope rather than my variable handwriting (as i was writing my congressmen).
April 16th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
I’ve been using glabels for a while, and it’s great for business cards, membership cards, return address labels, etc.
For mailing lists, where each label is different, check out “label nation”
http://www.red-bean.com/labelnation/
April 17th, 2007 at 4:16 am
glabels is a good tool for label creation. Now I’m writing a clone of this tool on Qt.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
I like glabels, but I am afraid the package in Debian is very very old: 2.1.3 currently in unstable, which dates from late 2006. In the meantime, several major improvements have taken place, and the current sourceforge version is 2.2.1 ! I recommend everyone to upgrade to this latest version which uses GtkPrint and Cairo.