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Comment Technology that gets out of the way (Score 1) 945

I think creative types like Macs because they know it's technology that will more or less work. They know they can go into a store, buy one system/OS from the same vendor that was designed specifically to work together so they don't have to waste calories figuring the thing out. It gets out of the way so they can continue being creative. They now have the added bonus of having branded stores that they can go into if they really have a problem.

The rest of the hangers on to that culture get to be associated with creative thinkers even if they're just listening to music and surfing the web

Comment More info needed... (Score 1, Interesting) 188

It would be helpful if you posted more information about what you're trying to print labels for and what size/shape/environmental requirements there are for the labels.

I can give you an example of what I have done for labels in the past though. I had a requirement to create thousands of labels for our inventory system. The only requirement was they had to be barcode readable and printed on small labels so we could tag our network equipment with them. The solution I came up with about 4 years ago (and is still in use today) was to use Avery 8167 (I believe) labels which are 1.75"x.5". I created the first sheet by hand using MS word since that's what the template I had access to was for. I used the "Free 3 of 9" font which is available for free on the web and put something like "*10001*10001" in each cell, incrementing by one each time. The font interprets the number surrounded by asteriks as a barcode and prints the same thing again in clear text. I then adjusted the font settings to the appropriate sizes and saved it. I then wrote a perl script that would parse the binary word document and change the numbers in each cell. It started with the number I fed it on the command line and ran through to the end.

Since our equipment is reasonably hands off, this system works well. We had tried doing this with a dedicated label printer before I started there and no one could reliably get the printer to work. It's a good solution since you can easily print off labels quickly from any machine since any laser printer can be printed to. It would probably be even easier to implement in openoffice since the document would be saved in XML and would be easier to parse.

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