Avoid a couple of Address Book printing bugs

Dec 29, '05 05:52:00AM

Contributed by: windrag

This is probably too late for the holidays, but if you're late getting those cards out, maybe this will still help you.

Address Book's envelope printing has been working well, for the most part, and I've been taking advantage of some of the nifty features, like including a picture near the return address and automatically printing the Spouse field. (Hint: if you don't know your friend's spouse's name, but you want to acknowledge that they have a family in your holiday mailing, put family in the Spouse field -- envelopes wil say George Smith and family, which is a nice touch).

All is going great, until I get to the envelope I printed for a friend who was just married this year. I really wanted to include her husband's name, but for some reason, it wasn't showing up. I finally figured out that the name in the Spouse field will not print if it begins with an A (go figure). The workaround I came up with was to change the A to Ă? (Option-e, shift-A). The name will then show up on the envelope. A little clunky, but it was the best I could come up with.

Another bug to look out for shows up when trying to create your own envelope templates. When you select File->Print in Address Book, a sheet comes up that allows you to choose label, list and envelope styles and to define your own template. The problem is, when you choose Layout->Layout->Define custom…, you are not able to edit the value fields that result. The workaround here is to go ahead and give a name to the layout you have just started, choose Cancel from the Print dialog, and then go back and choose File->Print (cmd+p) again. Your parameter fields will now be editable.

Now get those cards out!

[robg adds: At first, I wasn't able to replicate the "spouse names starting with A don't print" glitch; they seemed to work fine for me. But then, in talking with my buddy Kirk McElhearn, he figured out the problem. The spouse's name will not print if and only if the spouse's name begins with the same letter as the entry's name -- Andrew and Amy, Bill and Becky, etc. Any other combination works fine. Unfortunately, you can't use a leading space to avoid the problem, either. The only workaround appears to be physically modifying the first letter in some manner. Hopefully this gets fixed quickly.]

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