gLabels Version 1.92.0 [LWN.net]

Version 1.92.0 (Unstable for GNOME 2) of gLabels was released earlier this month.

gLabels is a lightweight program for creating labels and business cards for the GNOME desktop environment. It is designed to work with various laser/ink-jet peel-off label and business card sheets that you'll find at most office supply stores. gLabels is free software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Essentially, gLabels is a customized drawing package with a specific purpose in mind, the creation of multiple labels that will be printed onto a sheet of adhesive labels.

To create a custom label, a specific label template is chosen, and a single label of the specified size is used as a drawing canvas. The following graphical objects are used to fill the individual label:

Text
Box/Rectangle
Line
Ellipse/Circle
Image
Barcode (12 different styles supported)

Typical scaling, rotating, and coloring options can be applied to the various drawing components. When printed out, the individual label is replicated to fill the multiple adhesive cutout spaces on a typical printed label sheet.

The application supports a huge list of label sizes and shapes, including address labels, business cards, CD/DVD labels, and more. If custom label sizes are required, documentation is available for creating new templates. Label templates are stored as XML files.

Take a look at the Screenshots page to see the application in use. System requirements and downloads of gLable are available here.

Applications like gLabels are exactly what Linux needs to become better established in the office environment. Here at LWN, gLabels is likely to find a use in the creation of labels for homebrew beer and mead.

For further reading, GnomeDesktop.org is currently running a review of gLabels.

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gLabels Version 1.92.0

Posted Sep 28, 2003 0:58 UTC (Sun) by smeg4brains (subscriber, #207) [Link]

I've used gLabels for a while, and while it's a great program, there is only one issue that's caused me a lot of grief.

If you include an image file that has transparency in it, you're nice high quality printout, will come out looking more like crayola scribblings.

The problem is not actually a problem in gLabels, but a problem with the gnome printing system. Currently it has no elegant way of dealing with transparencies in images. It ends up just merging the images together at some random dpi (actually I think it's a fixed dpi.. something like 75). It does this because it uses postscript for it's internal communication or something (I really don't know the details), and postscript doesn't have any idea what transparency is.. Postscript is, after all, supposed to be used for talking directly to your printer, in which case transparent and white are pretty much exactly the same thing.

This is a pretty major problem, that AFAIK has not been resolved by anyone, and might not even have a resolution in the works. Something's got to be done, even if it means "embracing and extending" the postscript used by the gnome print system to allow things to be handled properly. This is one of those minor little clean-up's that needs to be done if linux is going to be taken seriously (or gnome at least) on the desktop.

Of course, I still use gLabels all the time. I just merge pictures with transparencies in gimp and then flatten them out before I put them in gLabels.