Christmas Labels

by Edward S. Baiz

The best thing about Christmas, if you are like most people, is the giving and receiving of presents. Right behind this is the sending and receiving of Christmas cards. Before I was married, I loved helping my mother address our cards. Of course, opening cards we received was always a pleasure.

After I got married, my wife and I sent out Christmas cards, but the list was much larger now. She had many more friends than I did and she liked to send cards to the people she worked with rather than just giving them to everyone at work like I did. Needless to say, after a few years of writing almost 100 addresses, I started to look for a better way.

I was already using a great program to store addresses of friends and relatives. It is simply called, "Address" and was written by Carsten Setje-Eilers. I received a registered version when I bought an issue of Atari Computing. I had been using the unregistered version, so I was thrilled when I saw the program on the Atari Computing disk. I first started out using Address to build my address list. Then, when it came time to address the Christmas cards, I would load up the program on my Hades and bring up each person's address I wanted to send a card to. I would then address the card and then go on to the next person(s). This took a lot of time, so I had Address print out the whole list. This saved me a little more time, but still not enough to make any real difference. By the time I decided to look for another way to do this, my Christmas card list was up to about 130 and growing.

It was then I realized I wanted to do what most computer users were doing: I wanted to print out my address labels. But how was I going to do this. Sure, Address could print out an address or my whole list, but it could not put them on the nice address labels many computer stores sell. I suppose I could have printed the addresses directly on the envelopes, but that would have taken more time than I wanted to spend on this. Then I noticed something on list window of Address.

The third icon down is a clipboard. When clicked, this exported a selected address to the Atari clipboard (CLIPBRD folder) on partition C. And the resulting export was in the form I wanted it to be:

First name Last Name
Address
City State Zip

Now all I needed was to find a program that would print the addresses on regular address labels. Enter Calamus SL. I bought this program when support for PageStream was dropped for Atari computers. In fact, Invers gave me a big discount because I owned PageStream. I am glad this happened anyway. Calamus is just about the best DTP program ever and the Atari TOS version is still being supported.

I went to the computer store and started looking at address labels. I could not use the rolls as my printer (Epson Stylus 700 Photo) does not have a tractor feed. Besides, I did not want to print one label at a time. So, I started looking at sheets. There were many different kinds of labels which varied in size. I wanted to make sure I had enough room to print everything in a font size that would make it easy to read, so I chose labels that were 1 inch by 4 inches. This may seem a little large to most of you, but actually it is not. I bought the Avery brand of label, #8161 for ink jet printers. There are 20 labels to a sheet and 25 sheets in one pack. Printing 20 labels at a time would work out just fine for me.

The next step was the hardest and took the longest for me to accomplish. I had to draw a template of the sheet of labels I had chosen. Avery offers templates of its labels, but none of these would work on my machine. At least, that is what I thought, so I set out drawing one. I brought up a new document, size 8.5 inches by 11 inches and made sure Calamus had its measurement rulers on. This would make it easier for me to duplicate the Avery sheet of labels on my Calamus screen. I measured everything, including the borders that Avery normally has on the left and right side of its labels and the space that went down the middle of each sheet. I even had to take into account the top and bottom, which had Avery's name, logo, telephone number and web site address.

Next I had to visualize how I wanted each label to look. I really liked the labels that had graphic pictures on them along with the addresses so I chose this style. Calamus puts its graphic and text data into what are called frames, so each label had to consist of a graphic frame and a text frame. This meant the combined length of the text and graphic frame had to be about 4 inches. The width of each frame was obvious to me. The text frame would have a width of the label (1 inch), but it would not be practical to have the width of the graphic frame that width as it would look funny in the finished product. I realized it would be better if the graphic frame was centered width-wise, so I chose its size to be about 3/4 inch by 3/4 inch. This proved to be the perfect choice. I also put a little space between the frames (about 3/16 inches) since most labels of this type had one. This resulted in the text frame to have measurements of a little over 1 inch by 3 inches. The overall length was the 1 inch by 4 inches that I was looking for. I will say that the space between the frames and the size of the graphic frame varied. I will talk about this later.

I drew the first frame as I described above and positioned it on the screen based on my measurements of the sheet of labels. The next thing was to find out what font size would work out best. I wanted the space between the top text line and the top of the text frame to be the same distance between the third text line and the bottom of the text frame.

Before choosing the font size, I felt it was best to choose what font I was going to use. The reason for this is that spacing and other factors are different. In other words size 15 pt of one font might fit fine in my text frame, but another font of the same point size might not. The Times font is one of my favorites, so I ended up choosing Times Roman.

Now that my font was chosen, I could then concentrate on choosing the right font size. However, I realized I had to contend with one thing: when you go to type text in a text frame, the text cursor appears in the upper-left of the frame in the font size you are using. So, I first started by thinking I would choose a font size that allowed me to have five lines in my text frame. This way, I would have three lines centered with one line above and below. This sounds reasonable except when I found a size that would work this way, it was too small in relation to the label. You could read it, but it looked funny.

After a lot of thinking, I came up with a procedure that worked. I started out with the text font being small (6 pt). With the text cursor in the upper-left of my text frame, I typed my address using three lines. Then I hit the [Return] key which gave me that little space I wanted. I highlighted the text and chose another larger font size. After some experimenting, I found that font size 13 pt worked out great. This font size was not originally in the font size list that I could choose from, I had to manually add it. With the 6 pt font size at the top and bottom of the text frame and the 13 pt font size for my text, the address was centered perfectly in the actual label. Of course this procedure can be applied to other labels, but the actual numbers would differ with different sized labels.

OK, I had my label on the screen and drawn with the graphic frame and text frame with text that was black in color. I clicked on the graphic frame and then imported a simple monochrome graphic picture. I printed out this one label on a plain sheet of paper. After it was done, I put the paper over a sheet of blank labels and held it upto the light to see if the positioning of the label was correct with the sheet. This is why I wanted everything on this test label to be black, it made it very easy to see. After a little adjusting, I had the one label positioned just right. I, of course, saved the file and then went on to the task of copying the label 20 times so it filled the sheet. I could have actually copied this label 20 times, but there is a much easier way in Calamus. I used the Group and Copy features. I grouped the text and graphic frames of the one label into one frame. Then I highlighted the one frame and set the copy feature to copy that frame one time across about 4 1/8 inches. I then printed out these two labels and checked them. Once they were correct, I saved the file. So then I copied these two labels and set the copy feature for nine times down one inch apart. I then printed out all 20 labels and checked their positioning. Once they all looked good, I used the Ungroup feature so as to get my individual text and graphic frames and then saved the file.

Everything looked good, but I still had one more thing to decide. What color should the text be? The obvious colors were red and green. I printed some labels with all green and all red text. They looked nice, but what I finally decided on was red for the name and green for the address. This looked great to me and even my wife liked this color combo, but there was still one more little thing. Calamus comes with nice color sets with many shades of the same color. I wanted the red and green color to be dark and bold. The light shades just did not look too good. What I finally chose was red #4 and green #13. This looked great on the label and was very easy to read. I then saved the file.

Now came something I had been thinking about from the beginning. How do I get all my addresses in Address to appear in my file in Calamus? Well I have used Calamus enough to figure this out. I highlighted a text frame and then went to the import feature. I chose the text to be imported as ASCII text, to replace the text already in the text frame and the file to be imported was the SCRAP.TXT file in the clipboard folder on my partition C. If you remember this was the same file that Address used when it exported its data. Well this worked fine except the text appeared in the 6 pt font size and the color was either all red or green. All I had to do to finish the text, was to hit the [Return] key, highlight the text and change the size to 13 pt. If the text color was all red, I would highlight the address and change it to green. If the text color was all green, then I highlighted the name and changed it to red. The color of the imported text will be what the Color Text option is set to. That is why in the file I deleted all the other colors except the #4 red and #13 green. When the file originally loads, the color of text starts out being set to #4 red.

Like I said, the import of the address data worked out fine and I could have imported all my address labels like the above, but this would involve a lot of mouse clicking. I needed to cut this down a little. After a bit of reading the manual I found out that Calamus comes with a very good macro recorder. This wonderful function will record all mouse clicks used in Calamus and will work with all functions of Calamus except attributes. This means that mouse clicks that involve font color and font size I would still have to do. So I created a macro that would import (in ASCII text) the SCRAP.TXT file (in the clipboard folder on my C partition) into the designated text frame in Calamus. One important note: in the macro, it works best if you have Calamus use its own file selector. If you do not, when the macro gets to any other file selector, it will stop the macro and you will have to choose what file you want loaded. Then the macro will continue.

Now everything was set. I loaded up Address. I then highlighted an address and told Address to export it to the clipboard by clicking on the clipboard icon. I then clicked on one of the text frames and made sure I had the text cursor flashing in the upper-left of the frame. Now all I had to do to activate the macro was to hit the keys [Alternate]+[Z] (I had set this combo when I created the macro). It worked great. The highlighted address in Address was imported into the designated text frame. I only had to increase the font size and color the text in the colors I wanted. One sheet of 20 labels would take me about 5-10 minutes.

To make things go faster I would save the file after I completed the sheet, so I ended up with seven files. Then I just printed each file all at one time. I used to print each sheet after I was done with one sheet. Basically each way takes about the same time, but it just seemed to me it was better to get one step out of the way first (typing and setting up the labels) and then do the next step (printing).

But before I really started to print the labels, I had to choose some Christmas images to use. The first time I used the sheets I found a nice picture of a Christmas that I used one year. It looked great on all the labels going out, but the next year and every year after that I decided to use more than one graphic image. I chose about 5-8 images, then I would import them in various graphic frames on the sheet. I use everything from Jesus to Santa. If I knew someone was more religious about Christmas, I would make sure his/her label consisted of a cross, or Jesus or maybe a church.

Then I had another idea. Instead of searching for images to use in Christmas magazines/articles, I would use some of the Christmas cards that people had sent me the year before. I picked ones that had large images and a lot of bright colors. Since I have a Microtek E3 scanner in my system, I just scanned the cards I wanted to use and then re-adjusted them for use. The driver I use is ScanX and when I scan a card the resulting picture is about 4-6 MB in size and has a resolution of about 1,200 DPI. This is because I set ScanX to use a 300 DPI resolution and a 16 million color mode. I use programs like Smurf, PhotoTip and Image Copy to decrease the resolution to about 700 DPI, brighten/darken the image if needed and do any needed cropping. The final image would end up being about 800 KB to about 2 MB. I used to get the images down to less than 100 KB, but experience has taught me that it is best to have them as large as your computer can handle. This way, they print out a lot better and look fantastic. This meant each file of 20 labels was about 65 MB and since I have 256 MB of RAM in my Hades, this is no problem. It was then I realized why Dave Barkin, Calamus expert, has over 500 MB of RAM in his Hades. Here are some examples of images I used this year in my labels:

Here is the finished article below. In the actual document the graphic and text frame lines are still visible on the screen. That is okay, as they will not show when the labels are printed out. I keep them there for reference if I have to make any adjustments.

All right that is about it. There are just a few more things I would like to mention. If any Calamus user wants my file for the Avery labels #8161, just mail me at edbaizjr@attbi.com. Also, I know there are some Calamus experts out there that probably know better ways to do the things I have described above. Well I am not a Calamus expert yet. I still have a lot of things to learn, but I am on my way. Take care, happy holidays to all.

MyAtari magazine - Feature #7, December 2002