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Spouse not printing in Address Book workaround
Authored by: noworryz on Dec 16, '06 06:50:18PM

Here's a workaround for the spouse not printing in Address Book, e.g., when printing envelopes. This is also known as the "Address Book missing spouse problem."

As mentioned above, the spouse will not print if the spouse's name matches the first name of any card (more accurately, neither the spouse or children will print if the first name on any card is a prefix of the spouse's or children's name). We are going to ensure that this never occurs.

The trick is to insert an invisible character at the beginning of the spouse's and children's name. A non-breaking space will not work but the unicode character 'hex 80' will work. (You could use a period, instead, but it will show on the envelope.)

Here is how to rapidly insert this character at the beginning of each name. If the Character Palette is not in your menu bar, go to System Preferences->International->Input Menu and turn it on.

Select Character Palette from the menu bar. Select Code Tables in the View pull-down menu. Click on the Unicode tab. In the center panel, scroll down until "0080" is on the left. Click once in the first column to the right of "0080" (under the "0" at the top). Go to the bottom of the palette and select "Add to favorites" from the little gear-shaped Action pull-down menu.

Click on the Favorites tab at the top of the palette. You should see something that looks like a fancy backwards-N. If you single-click on it, its information will say "Unicode: 0080 UTF8: C2 80."

Keep the palette open and go back to Address Book. Click twice (slowly, not a double-click) at the beginning of a spouse or child name to get a vertical insertion bar. Then double-click the backwards-N in the character palette. Repeat until all names on the card are altered. If you then print the card, the spouse will appear.

Don't bother trying to cut and paste the special character; it won't work.

You can quickly flip between cards by holding down the command key and pressing the "]" key. This will let you fix your entire address book in about 20 seconds per card.

Enjoy the holidays now that you can print your cards and not have to explain to your spouse why the other spouse's names won't print.



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Spouse not printing in Address Book workaround
Authored by: ElectroLund on Dec 17, '09 12:09:47AM

This is a great howto post, but in Snow Leopard, this doesn’t seem to work any longer.

My labels aren’t printing spouses. :( Any thoughts?



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Spouse not printing in Address Book workaround
Authored by: barefootguru on Dec 18, '09 01:06:54PM

You can hack it by copying ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist from a Leopard copy of Address Book into the Snow Leopard Address Book.

See posting by Steve Rhyne in this thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2219019&start=30

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