glabels: Ready For Prime Time

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is running a review of glabels. It's still in beta status, but it's ready for prime time now. It knows hundreds of predefined label formats and allows you to design your own templates for custom work. Barcodes, images, just about anything but MP3 tracks can be printed on them. glabels is destined to become one of the most popular native apps for Linux." If you need harder-core barcode support, the excellent kbarcode would probably make a good complement. (NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.)

Comments

Wrong link

[lovemayo]

its not kbarcode.org, but kbarcode.net

barcodes == MP3

[ChipMonk]

Since a barcode is merely a specialized format for binary data (similar to a hard drive's RLL, in fact), I'm sure it's a matter of time until someone figures out how to transfer audio data to a print medium, for later retrieval via barcode scanner.

I know a hobbyist magazine back in the '80s used to print entire programs in barcode format. I think it was for the old Radio Shack Model 100 laptop.

Re:Standard in Open Office

[prockcore]

great idea that *nix has this now but these sorts of things have been standard in MSWord for a long time

Not really. You need Avery to do anything more than wipe your ass with a sheet of labels under Word.

OOo has label support, it even has more templates than Word... but neither are as complete as Avery.

This is supposed to compete with Avery.

I like gLabels

[steveha]

I recently used it to mass-print a bunch of name badges on name badge stock in my laser printer.

I have also used it for labels; you can print just a few labels from a sheet, by specifying which label to start printing upon. So, if you have a sheet of labels, and you have used up the first 11, you can tell gLabels to start printing labels on the 12th label on the sheet. It's slick.

Finally, this is just the thing for address labels on a dedicated mini-label printer. I don't have that set up yet, but I intend to soon.

Someone asked why you can't just use OpenOffice for your labels; I want to have OpenOffice print by default to my laser printer, and gLabels by default print to the mini labels-only printer. I wouldn't object to OpenOffice knowing how to pass labels off to the mini-label printer too, of course.

steveha

Re:Underpromise, Overdeliver

[tuffy]

I'd just assume there would be a way to print envelopes/labels from linux. Even if it was an OO.o template, or some such. It's a fairly simple task.

gLabels has been around for three years. It might look nicer now and support more labels than it did then, but it isn't as if Linux has gone without a method of making them until now.

I hope that it improved

[DeadSea]

When I last tried glabels a few months ago it has some pretty serious image quality problems. The templates were plentiful and well defined. The editing was intuitive and easy. However I could never get the images to come out printed well.

The problem seemed to be two-fold:

1. Image scaling seemed to be done using linear interpolation. Sorry, but that doesn't cut it for anything that should have presentation. All the lines come out with jaggies. Use bi-cubic please.
2. Printing was done at 72dpi. Hello, my printer is 1200 dpi, can you please take advantage of it?

In my experience, it did a great job of easily producing poor quality labels. Anybody know if these issues have been resolved in the current version?

Re:I hope that it improved

[Anonymous Coward]

DPI = dots per inch = DPI. Not too tough to figure out.

You, sir, did not understand what the parent meant. Although his post was a bit confusing, he was right to some extent. Let's try to rephrase that:

monochrome dots per inch != perceived full-color dots per inch

Basically, your printer is using lots of small monochrome dots in each of the 3, 4, 6 or whatever number of colors that it supports. These small dots are not seen individually by the eye, but are perceived as bigger dots with mixed colors. In that case, a 24-bit picture at 72 DPI may require a 1200 DPI printer if you do not want to lose quality.

That being said, I think that defaulting to 72 DPI is a poor choice. This may be suitable for printing photos on medium-quality labels, but is not appropriate if you want to include high-resolution graphics to be printed in high-quality lablels. Especially if your graphics are mostly monochrome and do not have color gradients, etc. You will lose a lot on the edges.

Re:Standard in Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried to use the label printing option in Open Office? I have. My wife asked me to print off 5 pages of labels. Sounds simple right? She needed to print off a bunch of name tags for kids and parents at her soccer club. The names were in a spreadsheet. Still sounds straightforward, right?

Not.

I think I spent 1-2 hours banging my head against open office trying to get this to work. It is possibly the clunkiest, craziest, non-intuitive procedure I've yet to come across.

Compared to that, the description of glabels sounds like a dream..

Re:Standard in Open Office

[ethix]

I find glabels very easy to use, and I really like the fact I don't have to fire up a full blown office suite to print some labels, or work on a business card. It's a terrific tool...cheers to the programmers.

Re:Standard in Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent post is just plain WRONG!

Since at least Office 97, Microsoft Word has had more templates than you can shake a stick at, and the ability to easily create custom ones in a snap. Not to mention a quick google for the ID of the label you are using will get you a template in no time flat.

Yea, Word isn't free software, but you are serving the entire open source community a grave injustice by flat-out lying about Microsoft products.