Copyright
=========

   gLabels - a GNOME-based label and business card creation program

   Copyright (C) 2000 Jim Evins

   This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
   the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
   (at your option) any later version.

   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
   GNU General Public License for more details.

   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
   along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
   Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

   For more details see the file COPYING.



What is gLabels
===============

gLabels is a small stand-alone program for creating labels and business
cards using a laser or ink-jet printer.

System Requirements
===================

GNOME-LIBS-1.2.x
GTK+-1.2.x
LIBXML-1.8.x
GNOME-PRINT-0.25
GDK-PIXBUF-0.11

All of these libraries are available as part of Gnome 1.4.

NOTE:
-----
To compile gLabels on RPM based systems, you will need the development
RPMs (e.g. gnome-print-devel) installed for each of these libraries.  For
example, the following './configure' error would indicate that you may
need to install the development RPM for the gnome-print library.

	checking for GNOME-PRINT >= 0.25... not found
	configure: error:

	You need GNOME-PRINT 0.25 or later to build gLabels
	If you think you already have this installed, consult the README.

To verify this, do the following:

	$ rpm -q -a | grep gnome-print

You should get something like this (your version numbers may be different):

	gnome-print-0.31-ximian.1
	gnome-print-devel-0.31-ximian.1

If you get no output, you will need to install both the library and
development RPMs.  If you only get the first of these lines, you still
need to install the development RPMs.  If you get the above error and
you get both of these lines, you probably have a fundamental configuration
problem.  These RPMs should be available from wherever you received
your gnome distribution.

NOTE:
-----
Special Note for Mandrake 8.1:  I recently installed Mandrake 8.1 on a
partition of a test machine.  I found that an rpm for gdk-pixbuf-devel
was on the 2nd CD, but it has a broken dependency (it's looking for
libgr-devel, which isn't on any of the CDs) so it did not show up in
Mandrake's package manager (at least that is what I suspect).  I manually
installed it with rpm using the --nodeps option, and was able to compile
with no problem.


Usage notes:
============
gLabels is still in its early stages of development and thus lacks any
"real" documentation.  Most folks have found it fairly easy to use, at
least for its simple composition features.  Beginning with version 0.4.x,
gLabels has a document-merge capability that might not be as intuitive
as these other features.

The first step to performing a document merge is to prepare a source
document that contains your merge data. This data could be mailing
addresses or any other data that you wish to create unique labels or
cards for.  Currently only a simple back-end for text files exists --
others are planned.  The currently supported text-file format is very
simple:  each line is a record; fields are delimited by tabs,
commas, or colons; and newlines can be embedded into fields by using
the "\n" entity.  This file could be created using any text editor or
could be created by another program or script.

A label must then be configured to "point at" this data file.  This is
accomplished with the "merge properties" dialog.  This dialog is used
to select the exact data file format and file name (location).  Customized
field keys can also be defined (the default keys are the column numbers).

Finally, once the label has been configured for a data file, field keys
can be inserted into text and barcode objects in their property dialogs.

Now that your label is configured, gLabels will print a unique label for
each record in your source document -- substituting fields from each
record for field keys in the all text and barcode objects.

Beginning with 0.4.3, a simple CLI front-end called "glabels-batch" is
provided to print previously created glabels files from a shell,
other programs or scripts.  Do a "glabels-batch --help" for usage
information.

Author and Acknowledgments:
===========================

See the AUTHORS file.
