1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2 <page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/" xmlns:e="http://projectmallard.org/experimental/" type="guide" id="mergefeatures" xml:lang="sl">
5 <link type="guide" xref="index#merging"/>
6 <revision pkgversion="3.0" version="0.1" date="2010-05-04" status="incomplete"/>
8 What you may expect from a document merge.
10 <credit type="author">
11 <name>Jim Evins</name>
12 <email>evins@snaught.com</email>
14 <credit type="author">
15 <name>Mario Blättermann</name>
16 <email>mariobl@gnome.org</email>
19 <p>Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0</p>
23 <title>Performing a document merge</title>
25 <p>Document Merge (sometimes called "Mail Merge") is a powerful
26 feature that allows a unique label or card to be printed for each
27 record in an external data source.</p>
29 <p>The first step to performing a document merge is to prepare
30 a source document that contains your merge data. This data could
31 be mailing addresses or any other data that you wish to create
32 unique labels or cards for. Currently back-ends only exist for
33 text files and the evolution data server -- others are planned. The currently
34 supported text-file format is very simple: each line is a record;
35 fields are delimited by commas (CSV), tabs, or colons; and newlines
36 can be embedded into fields by using the "\n" entity. This file
37 could be created using any text editor or could be created by
38 another program or script. A common way of creating CSV files is
39 to export them from a spreadsheet program.</p>
41 <p>A label must then be configured to "point at" this data file.
42 To configure the merge properties of a document, choose
43 <guiseq><gui>Objects</gui>
44 <gui>Merge Properties</gui></guiseq> menu item
45 to display the <gui>merge properties</gui> dialog. This
46 dialog is used to select the exact data file format and file
47 name (location) of the merge data.</p>
49 <p>Finally, once the label has been configured for a data file,
50 field keys can be inserted into text objects and used as source
51 or data for barcode objects and image filenames for image objects.
52 See <link xref="editprop"/> for more information
53 on using merge data for these object types.</p>
55 <p>Now that your label is configured, <app>gLabels</app> will print a unique
56 label for each record in your source document -- substituting fields
57 from each record for field keys in the all text, barcode, and
60 <p>See <link xref="merge"/> for a detailed
61 tutorial on the document merge feature.</p>