CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

In Germany, we need quite urgently some improvements for the address label feature - and I believe, in other parts of the world these might be useful as well. Refining my recent posting (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,30242.msg131661.html), I would see the following points:

• Sort function for postal code (either by a checkbox on the second screen, labeled "sort by postal code", or by using the sorting of the selection
• Above the address label, it should be possible to print the return address (sender address) in a smaller font - which allows the use of blank envelopes. (This might be implemented by allowing simple html commands within the  definition of the address labels)
• (desirable) {contact.country} should be printed only, if it differs from the senders country

We are willing to fund a significant part of the coding. However, it would be helpful to get this into the core with version 4.5!

Any other ideas, what should be changed on that feature? Anybody willing to participate in the financing?


Thanks for any remarks!


Detlev

Hi Dave,

thanks for your comments!

1. My understanding is that the mailing label output SHOULD follow the selected sort of the search results. Just re-tested on 4.4 demo and that it is what I observed.

What I am looking for is:
a) perform a search (e.g. all contacts within a smart group)
b) then sort e.g. by postal code
c) Print out mailing labels sorted by postal code

As I found out now, I got this on a 4.2 system to work - but only by going through advanced search and selecting a profile for search view. Without selecting a profile for search view, the labels won't be sorted!
This is, in fact, a little tricky, not far from being a bug.

(What I found out for 4.4 is: Try to sort the search results by postal code, and you will get no results anymore. However, this seems to be a real bug, and I will file a bug report for that!)

2. HTML to PDF conversion is not very reliable so I think this will need some more thinking. You might want to check out the implementation of the new Event Badges to see how we might do this based on some known envelope sizes and a checkbox to include sender (return) address.

Good idea - we will elaborate on that. And maybe we can reuse some code from the event badge thing.

3. Seems like a good default. But ... how is the "sender" address defined? The Organization Address vs. the primary address of the user's contact (the person logged in and creating the labels) vs.

Hmm, maybe we should make another approach: When printing the labels, there should be a multi country selector field, where the user can decide to "omit printing these country names".

Any other ideas?