Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 09:56:03 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: wwoods@cybcon.com Cc: david@dhw.vip.best.com, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Practical qurestion here.............. Message-ID: <199808281656.JAA07958@pau-amma.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.980827182531.wwoods@cybcon.com>
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>Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 18:25:31 -0700 (PDT) >From: William Woods <wwoods@cybcon.com> >OK folks...when I decided to go all FreeBSD I neglected something....mailing >lists stuff. I get every 4 monts a comma delinated (comma seperated - whatever) >list of addresses and other info on floppy disk.. I need to import this list >into a database and from there print mailing labels. MS Access would do this >easially, but is there arything for FreeBSD to do this. I would hate to >re-install windows just for this......help please. I'd hate for someone to feel forced to such an extreme measure... so if there's interest, I could try to package up some stuff I cobbled up to print labels, and put it somewhere that might be useful for folks to get to & use. It's an arguably unholy mixture of groff macros & Perl, along with a defined structure for configuration files to tell the above the characteristics of particular label stock. The script is designed to accept input that looks like: label 1 line 1... label 1 line 2... ... label 1 line n label 2 line 1... label 2 line 2... ... label 2 line n ... label N line 1... label N line 2... ... label N line n Oh, yeah -- the output is PostScript, and it's also written expecting to go to rectangular (vs. triangular, circular, or whatever) label stock. It isn't generalized as much as it really should be, but I haven't had much incentive to tinker with it much, since it works well enough for my purposes (including a rather degenerate case of using an entire sheet of 8.5"x11" paper as a single "label" that I refer to as "letterhead" -- oh, yeah -- envelopes are handled as "labels," too). Now... as for the data re-formatting.... The Perl script's input is fairly easily machine-generated (for example, if the first line is empty, it's ignored, so you can safely *always* prefix a new label with an empty line). I'd probably be willing ot cobble up a simple Perl script or something to eat the list of addresses that you get & output the form that the script eats... or maybe even twist the script that I have to recognize the format you use, if it seems sufficiently general. If that seems useful, please let me know at my home address (to which I'll Cc: this message), since all that is stuff I didn't do here, and isn't here. (For that matter, it isn't FreeBSD-specific, since it was developed originally on a BSD/386 system, and at home I run it on the Suns.) If I do make it available, I'm hoping (of course) that others will help improve it.... :-} david -- David Wolfskill UNIX System Administrator dhw@whistle.com voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 371-4621 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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