Printing address labels in Haiku

chaplintokyo · November 30, 2025, 1:20pm

Is there a recommended way to print a dress labels on Haiku?

I usually print out about a hundred address labels in December to send out my New Year Greeting Cards. The labels are printed onto a number of A4 sticky label sheets (pre-cut to make. total of 21 labels from 3 columns by 7 columns) .

The printing can be either horizontal lines or vertical lines but one requirement is the ability to layout the addresses nicely whether the addressee is an individual or couple.

Thanks.

Sebrof · November 30, 2025, 1:29pm

This should be easy to do in Libreoffice.

chaplintokyo · November 30, 2025, 1:41pm

Thanks. Is there a way to export the attributes from Haiku’s People files to csv or to LibreOffice’s calc files?

Sebrof · November 30, 2025, 1:45pm

I don’t know as I don’t used email on Haiku, but so long as you can ouput a CSV file you will almost certainly be able to import it into Haiku and then format it as required.

BlueSky · November 30, 2025, 7:49pm

There are probably existing tools to do this in a more elegant way but I was in the mood for some quick bash scripting

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/andimachovec/8f5ccef8f6a76380230b721cd638f75b

people2csv

#!/bin/bash
for PEOPLEFILE in ~/people/*; do
    NAME=`catattr --data META:name "$PEOPLEFILE"`;
    ADDRESS=`catattr --data META:address "$PEOPLEFILE"`;
    ZIP=`catattr --data META:zip "$PEOPLEFILE"`;
    CITY=`catattr --data META:city "$PEOPLEFILE"`;
    COUNTRY=`catattr --data META:country "$PEOPLEFILE"`;

    echo $NAME,$ADDRESS,$ZIP,$CITY,$COUNTRY;
done

It just runs through all people files in the people directory and outputs some of the attributes as csv data to the terminal. It can be easily extended to export more attributes or output to a file directly. But you can also just redirect the script output to a file or copy/paste it into one.

For a detailed explanation of what you can do with attributes on Haiku take a look to this section of the user guide: Attributes

Hope that points you in the right direction, if not just feel free to ask.

Disclaimer: I posted my code as a gist on Github because the forum software ate the backticks and I am seemingly unable to format the code correctly in Discourse.

chaplintokyo · December 1, 2025, 7:47am

Oh this is super cool. Thank you for writing this bash script. I really need to learn how to work with terminal like this!

Sebrof · December 1, 2025, 10:15am

This is a good mood, BlueSky!