PRINTING: glabels
Nick Peers reveals how to use glabels to design striking business cards or labels you can print on professional paper.
Nick Peers reveals how to use glabels to design striking business cards or labels that you can print on professional paper – or all that toilet roll you’ve got stockpiled…
Looking for a way to print labels or business cards using special paper? You can, of course, make use of Libreoffice’s built-in tools, but a simpler, more elegant method can be found with
glabels. This self-contained tool is designed to simplify the task of creating and printing all kinds of labels, cards, and photo collages, including CD/DVD covers.
Whereas Libreoffice’s template provides you with a sheet of preformatted labels, each of which has to be customised individually, glabels provides you with the tools to create a single design for all your labels, with the option of inserting data from a mail merge if you’re looking to print-out personalised labels such as addresses, as opposed to static elements like business cards. Once your basic template is chosen, you’re free to design your label using elements ranging from text, images, coloured shapes, lines and even barcodes.
The program is a classic example of doing what it says on the tin, keeping things as simple and intuitive as possible, and armed with our tutorial you’ll be equipped with everything you need to create your own labels or business cards.
Get glabels
The latest official build is 3.4.1, and this is available from the main Ubuntu software repositories from 18.10 onwards. If you’re running Ubuntu 18.04 and want the latest version, you can install it through this repo:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dominik-stadler/ppa $ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt install glabels Whichever way you install it, glabels can be launched from the main application launcher. It’ll open to the main glabels screen, which is blank by default.
Pick your label
Launch glabels and select File > New to get started with the Select Product wizard. You’ll open at the Search All tab where you’ll see a massive list of available labels from known brands like Avery and Viking. If you’re after a specific brand, select this from the Brand dropdown menu, then pick a paper size (the default is US Letter, but A4 is the obvious choice for most). There’s also a Category dropdown menu if you’re looking for a type rather than brand – options include differently shaped labels, name badge, mailing products, foldable cards, and photo products.
Scroll through the list until you find the template you’re looking for – if it’s missing, then follow the stepby-step guide to creating your own using the Template Designer, which makes things as easy as possible. Once you’ve selected your choice of template, click Next.
You’ll be prompted to choose the orientation for the content as it’ll appear on each label – normal or rotated. Make your choice and click Next. A handy preview makes it clear what you’ve selected – click Back to change your rotation settings or pick another template; otherwise click Apply to select the template (you can always change the orientation settings later on by going to File > Properties).
The label will now appear in the main glabels window, ready for you to populate with content. You’ll see the label shape and a red rectangle, inside which you can place your text, images and other elements.
There are two principal ways in which you’ll create this label. One way is as a single design that’s replicated across all your labels – say with your own name and address, plus optional decoration for a business card. The other way is to populate it with mail-merge data – typically other people’s names and addresses (a good way to mass-produce party invitations, for example).
Add universal elements
Start by working on the elements – glabels calls these objects – that you wish to appear on all your printed labels. The second row of buttons beneath the
program’s menus provide access to the many supported object types: text, shapes and lines, images, and one for barcodes (see our boxout on the right).
Like DTP packages, these can be layered one on top of each other, so if you wanted to lay down a coloured background, start with that as follows: Click to select the box object, then click and drag over the label where you’d like it to appear – if you need additional help with positioning and alignment, choose View > Grid. Once your object is in place, you’ll see drag handles appear around it for moving and resizing as required. You’ll also see an object properties panel appear on the right where you can change different elements through the various supported tabs.
The controls available here are based on the currently selected object and are largely selfexplanatory. The Line tab is where you set an object’s border colour and thickness, and you’ll see an option for adding a drop-shadow effect to most object types. All changes are immediately applied as you make them, making it easy to experiment.
Drag the text object onto the label and you’ll see a ‘Text’ placeholder appear, styled according to the text options at the bottom of the main window, which are replicated on the object’s Style tab. Use the Text tab to input your text. You’ll see an Insert Merge Field dropdown at the bottom of this window – currently greyed out. More on that shortly.
The image icon works in a similar way to creating a box object – a placeholder will appear once you’ve clicked and dragged to create the element. Click the File button on the Image tab to select your image, and the placeholder will automatically resize to ensure that the image is displayed with the correct proportions. When resizing it by hand, be sure to hold Ctrl as you click and drag the object’s handles to maintain the correct aspect ratio, or make use of the Size tab to do so manually (here, Lock Aspect Ratio is selected by default).
Now it’s a mixture of good and not-so-good news. First, glabels will respect any transparent background in supported images (typically PNG, GIF or SVG). Unfortunately, it’s lacking any opacity settings for individual objects, including the image. This means that if you wish to deploy an image as a watermark, you must prepare it first using your image editor before importing it. Finally, while glabels enables you to alter the layered order of your objects, its settings are a little blunt: you can only move objects to the top or bottom of the pile, but not in between, so be prepared to experiment with rearranging multi-layered objects.
Make use of mail merge
One common use for labels is to provide multiple names and addresses from a database, and glabels can work with a wide range of common plain-text formats spanning comma, tab, colon and semicolon delimiters. It also supports vcards and Evolution address books.
Make sure your CSV or TSV file is properly formatted: open it in a text editor and verify the delimiter character,
and also make sure that there are no speech marks surrounding each value (so Bob and not “Bob”) – and remove them if they exist. In addition, check to see if the first line lists all the field names (such as first_name and so on).
Once your file passes muster, choose Objects > Merge properties in glabels or click the Edit Merge Properties button on the toolbar to get started. First, select your file format from the Format dropdown menu – use the Keys On Line 1 option if your file has field headers in the first row. Next, click Location to load in your CSV file.
If all is correct, you should see a list of records identified by the first field, all preselected by default. Click > next to an entry to expand it and verify that each record is correctly formatted – don’t worry if more fields are displayed here than you need – each field is placed individually onto your label, so you can simply ignore those you don’t plan to use.
Next, go through the list, removing the tick next to any people you don’t want to include on your labels – if you’re only looking to select a handful of people, click
Unselect All and then just tick the people you do want to include. Once your recipients are selected, click OK.
Input fields
You’ve selected the people to include on your address labels, now all that’s left to do is populate the label with the details you wish to include from each record. This involves creating a text object, then using the Insert Merge Field dropdown to add each field in turn.
When you click this, you’ll see a list of all available field names (taken from the first line of your CSV document) – select the first one and you’ll see it appear in code in the Text box. You can continue to use the dropdown box or manually enter the field references yourself using the same syntax: ${fieldname}.
You can, of course, mix and match field references with regular text, so don’t forget your punctuation and any other universal text you wish to add. One handy setting – found under the Style tab – is Allow Merge To Automatically Shrink Text. Ticking this ensures that your names and addresses will fit within the label’s margins, although it won’t stop them running over or under any other objects on the label.
Tweak your design
Once your basic elements are on the page, save your work if you’ve not already done so, and then start selecting individual elements to tweak them further – resize, nudge them into a new position (or use the Objects > Center menu to align them horizontally or vertically), experiment with new colours and images, and so on.
If you’d like to see how your labels are progressing, select File > Print. Select your printer and click the Preview button to see how they’ll appear when printed – you’ll quickly spot typos (like incorrect syntax such as missing the leading $ when inputting a field) and whether any auto-fitted elements still appear on top of or under other objects. Click Close to return to the main screen and continue editing your design.
When you’re happy, it’s time to print your labels or cards. Select File > Print again, but take the time to go through the various tabs before clicking Print. For example, select the Page Setup tab to select the correct paper type and source depending on what paper you’re using (there’s a dedicated option for Labels) and whether you’re feeding the paper in manually or using the main tray.
The Labels tab is worth spending some time on. First, you can choose which label to start on – perfect if you’ve got a sheet where you’ve already used some of the labels. There’s also a handy Print Outlines option that you can tick to print on plain paper and then test against your actual labelled paper to verify that they line up correctly.
When you’ve worked through all the tabs, click Print and wait while your labels are rendered in printed form. Once saved, you can then reopen the label in future to print from it again – note, however, that while the link to any mail-merge documents is preserved, you’ll need to manually reselect records to print, because glabels defaults to selecting everyone in the database.