Index

1. Common Problems.

1.1 How can I instruct glabels to not print blank address lines when doing a document merge?

This feature can be best described by a simple example. In the following CSV file, column 5 contains the second address line for each record. This field is empty in records 1 and 2, but not in record 3. (For this feature to work, the field must be completely empty -- any text, including spaces will defeat this feature.)

Summers,Joyce,,"1630 Revello Dr",,Sunnydale,CA,95037 McGarret,Steve,O,"404 Piikoi Street",,Honolulu,HI,96813 Kramer,Cosmo,,"Apt 5B","129 W. 81 St.","New York",NY,10024-7207

In the following screenshot, a single multiline text object has been created to format these addresses. Notice that ${5} representing the second address line is on a line by itself. (Any additional text on this line, including spaces would defeat this feature.)

Printing this label results in the following output.

2. Obsolete Problems (problems with older versions of gLabels).

2.1 I cannot edit text. What's wrong? (2.0.x)

This is most likely due to an in libbonoboui that was introduced in GNOME 2.8. The symptom is that as soon as you select a text object, its object property editor apears briefly then disappears.

The workaround for this bug is to resize the glabels window so that it is large enough to display the text property editor in the sidebar. Note: it is impossible for glabels to automatically do this since the size needed will vary with different themes, font sizes, and locales.

This problem is fixed in the development branch of glabels (2.1.x) by using the GtkUIManager instead of libbonoboui to build the user interface. These changes are very extensive and require later versions of GNOME, thus are not suitable for backport into the 2.0.x branch..

2.2 Why don't transparent images print correctly? (1.92.1 - 2.1.3)

There is currently a limitation in the postscript back-end of libgnomeprint that causes images with an alpha channel to be composited in an intermediate context at 72 DPI. Unfortunately an image only needs to have an alpha channel to trigger this behaviour even if the image is completely opaque, therefore in earlier versions of gLabels (before 1.92.1) all GIF and PNG images would be printed at 72 DPI. To work around this problem image compositing was sacrificed for full resolution rendering beginning with gLabels 1.92.1.

If you are compiling gLabels from source and are willing to sacrifice image quality for image transparency, you can disable the workaround by compiling glabels with the NO_ALPHA_HACK option: