Printing mailing labels from address book including spouses name

m0thr4, look at my earlier posts, in Page 3. There is a fix you can do to your Address Book and make it work. Trust me.

ElectroLund wrote:
m0thr4, look at my earlier posts, in Page 3. There is a fix you can do to your Address Book and make it work. Trust me.

Yes, thank you but I tried your fix (and checked several times that I didn't miss a step) and it didn't work.

EDIT: I wondered whether all you people reporting it working were maybe from the USA... sure enough, I found that if I change the address format to "United States", the spouse shows up when you print as a label. I wonder... did it ever work for addresses outside the USA? And why would the address format affect things anyway?

Message was edited by: m0thr4

Hmm, that is curious. Yes, I am from the US. Which country are you from? That plist seems to enable this feature based on the country. Can you try adding your country abbreviation to the list?

I'm in the US as well and it works for me. If you want to try adding your country code, they can be found in a table at the Wikipedia site for ISO 3166-1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO3166-1alpha-2

-Jay

Jay Deitch wrote:
I'm in the US as well and it works for me. If you want to try adding your country code, they can be found in a table at the Wikipedia site for ISO 3166-1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO3166-1alpha-2

-Jay

Well, there's a "uk" code in there... I thought that was for United Kingdom. According to that wikipedia page, the code should actually be "gb". Curse my country, its stupid overlong name (which is actually The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) and its insistence on reserving two country codes. I'll try adding "gb" in there and see if that makes a difference.

😟

Yep fixed!!

For anyone living in the "United Kingdom of blah blah blah & blah", you need to modify the "uk" to "gb" (or simply add "gb" as you never know if Apple will revert to using that at some point).

Thanks for your assistance Jay Deitch.

Thanks! This was most useful and fixed the vast majority of the "spousal" problems I was having. However, I still have four that won't print the spouse's name on a label. One of them lives in Spain (though my UK people worked just fine), and the others are all local to the US. The only thing all four of them have in common is that the spouse's first name is the same as the first name of a different "primary" entry in Address Book; that is, if I'm trying to print John and Jane Doe, Jane's name doesn't print because I have "Jane Smith" as an entry. I did add last names to each of the spouse names, but these four simply refuse to cooperate.

Any ideas?

Thanks again for solving most of the problem. 🙂

Sandra Foster wrote:
I still have four that won't print the spouse's name on a label

Check the Mac OS X Hints article linked earlier in this thread. There's an awfully convoluted logic behind it:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051221232010333

Tom Robinson5 wrote:

Sandra Foster wrote:
I still have four that won't print the spouse's name on a label

Check the Mac OS X Hints article linked earlier in this thread. There's an awfully convoluted logic behind it:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051221232010333

Okay, I read the article, but I don't quite understand how it applies to my particular situation. It's talking mostly about country codes, and my biggest problem was the fact that some of my contacts won't show the spouse's name if there's another person listed with the same first name. This doesn't really make sense to me, since I've listed the spouse with the husband's last name. What am I missing here? I'm confused. :S

Sandra Foster wrote:
Okay, I read the article, but I don't quite understand how it applies to my particular situation. It's talking mostly about country codes, and my biggest problem was the fact that some of my contacts won't show the spouse's name if there's another person listed with the same first name. This doesn't really make sense to me, since I've listed the spouse with the husband's last name.

You need to change the spouse's name so it doesn't match somebody else in the address book. I used to prepend mine with a period but you can use an invisible character per the posting 'Spouse not printing in Address Book workaround' below the hint.

The confusing nature could well be why Apple's hidden this feature. Keep in mind the spousal-name feature may be removed completely or revamped in a future OS release.

Cheers

Okay, I have to admit that I hadn't read the comments at the bottom of the original article. Sorry about that. However, neither adding a period nor adding an invisible character (as explained in that article) worked for me. I guess it's either been revamped or there's some sort of glitch in my set-up. :S Thanks for trying.

Sandra, to get those four cards to print with spouse's name, add the same address on the spouse's card.

From http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3952 -

Related names will not appear on the envelope or label in Mac OS X 10.4 through 10.5.8 if another card exists with the same first name as the related name and a different address than the card you are printing. To ensure that the related name will get printed, create a card with the same name as the related name, and include the same address as the card you are printing.

Alannie,

Thanks for the link to the knowledgebase article. It's interesting that they recommend (for 10.6) modifying the first name to include multiple names (for example from "John" to "John and Jane") to get both names to appear when printing - ugly!

Also note the article was last revised on December 15, 2009.

Jay

I agree — very ugly. That KB article also says:

+In Mac OS X 10.6 or later, Address Book will print the prefix, suffix, first, middle, and last names that appear in the card being printed, but none of the related names will be printed on mailing labels or envelopes.+

They seem — with this sentence — to be giving up completely on the possibility of printing labels with more than one name. :S