Why can't Address Book allow me to add "spouse" to the print job?

My third frustration was related to the printing of spouses’ names on the envelope. Address Book includes this potentially very cool feature, whereby it will grab the value from the Spouse field and insert it into the printed address. So an entry for Sally Sample with the Spouse field set to Steve Sample should print the first line of the address as Sally and Steve Sample . In my testing, however, the results were spotty—sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. I couldn’t figure out why it worked sometimes and not others.

It took some digging on macosxhints and other sites to find the cause of the problem, as well as a solution. The problem is caused by Address Book’s fuzzy matching on first names. In the example above, if I have another entry anywhere in my Address Book with a first name of Steve, then the spouse information will be missing when I print Sally Sample’s entry. That’s right; if a spouse’s first name is not unique in the Address Book database, it will not be printed. This problem doesn’t exist if you’ve coded the person as a partner (which appears as Sally Sample and Steve ) instead of a spouse.

So what’s the solution for this one? You need to create an Address Book entry for the spouse, with the address exactly matching that used in the other record. In my example above, after creating a new card for Steve Sample, and using Sally Sample’s address on it, the name entry on the envelope printed correctly. It’s a pain, but it does work.

Note that you also must use full names in the Spouse field to make this work; just entering the first name won’t work, even if the spouse has a card of their own. If you don’t enter a last name in the spouse field, Address Book will print using the Partner format, with and Steve at the end. Note that you can use this fact to send cards to Sally Smith and Family —just enter Family in the Spouse (or Partner) field.

http://www.macworld.com/article/54466/2006/12/envprint.html

Apple Actually had this feature in older versions of the address book and for some reason removed it.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3952?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Why?

Why not make it a preference option?

[ ] Include spouse when printing labels/envelopes

Need to buy a $40 label program (OS X is $30). Stupid and aggravating.

Source: This post is sort of a condensed version of an old Apple Support Communities discussion (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2219019 ) that was created when this functionality was removed starting with the release of Snow Leopard.

To include spouse names on mailing labels in Mountain Lion (or Lion or Snow Leopard), the following plist needs to be created and added to the Contacts package. Before Mountain Lion, the Contacts application was called Address Book so that is the package to modify if you are running Snow Leopard or Lion.

1. Quit Contacts

2. Copy the code below into a UTF-8 text editor (I prefer TextWrangler):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>


<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">


<plist version="1.0">


<dict>


<key>ca</key>

<true/>


<key>uk</key>


<true/>

<key>us</key>

<true/>


<key>fr</key>


<true/>

</dict>

</plist>

3. Save this as “ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist”

4. Open the Applications folder and right-click (or control-click) on "Contacts."

5. Select "Show Package Contents."

6. Open the "Contents" folder and put the "ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist" file in the "Resources" folder.

7. You'll probably get a message that says "The item "ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist" cannot be moved because "Resources" can't be modified." Click on "Authenticate" and then enter your admin user name and password.

8. Note that country codes for Canada (ca), the UK, the US and France are included. If you have other countries in your contact list, you’ll need to add them to the list. The Country Codes can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

-Jay

Hello again,

I added spaces in front of the code to make it easier to read in the last post. I don't know if that will mess it up or not. Here is the code without the spaces. Just copy it and paste it into TextWrangler (or whatever)...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>


<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">


<plist version="1.0">


<dict>


<key>ca</key>

<true/>


<key>uk</key>


<true/>

<key>us</key>

<true/>


<key>fr</key>


<true/>

</dict>

</plist>

Jay, Thanks so much for this. You you did a great job of condensing down a long thread. I just now followed this to the letter, and it all appeared to work exactly as you suggested, yet I am not getting any kind of spouse name on my address labels. I am running MAC OS X version 10.7.5. In my address book I have created spouses names three ways: with different first name and last name, first name and same last name and first name only, and none of them are showing up. It is really the two spouses with different names I am trying to get: Jill Smith, Jack Jones either with an & or on two lines. I am no programer, and wouldn't be able to tell if I made a mistake. There are no spaces in my Wangler document, <?xml, etc. is on line one, and </plist> is on line 14. I followed each of your other steps, so the document is in the Resources file with the exact title you gave it.

Once I open my address book and pull up the print feature I can spouses names on List but there is no option in the pull down menus and they aren't automatically showing up. Am I miss one last crucial step? Thanks so much. I've been frustrated with this for years and was thrilled by hope of a solution. Elizabeth

Hi Elizabeth,

Sorry I didn't respond earlier- I've been out of town. One thing to confirm is that the addresses are exactly the same for both people (no extra spaces, etc.) in your list of contacts. Also, the name in the "Spouse" field needs to be exactly the same as the First and Last name in the record for the other person. For example the record for John Smith would show Jane Doe in the Spouse field and the record for Jane Doe would show John Smith in the Spouse field.

I just tried it again (OS 10.8.2) and the label for Jane Dow shows:

Jane Doe and John Smith

100 Main Street

City, State, ZIP

If the record for John Smith is selected, the label shows:

John Smith and Jane Doe

100 Main Street

City, State, ZIP

In the case where the last names are the same, the label shows:

Jane and John Smith

100 Main Street

City, State, ZIP

Hope this helps,

Jay

This solution isn't working for me.

I created and moved over the ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist file to the appropriate location in Contacts.app's Package.

I'm running 10.8.2 as well.

Using the John Smith/Jane Doe example, both entries have the exact same address (with no typos), the full names of each spouse in the related name/spouse fields exactly corresponding and spelled the way that they are on their own cards.

Do the country fields in the address need to be filled? I tried "US", "us", "USA", and "United States" anyways, and it didn't make a difference.

What makes me think it is not working is the preview window in the print dialogue panel doesn't show any "John Smith and Jane Doe" but just "John Smith" or "Jane Doe" - just the name of the contact on the card.

Was the xml/plist file supposed to add an option in a drop-down menu somewhere or something? It looks to me that the xml/plist file is just a case/switch scenario checking if the country flags true for either "us", "uk", or "fr" in its unaltered state.

Perhaps when you first created/moved your file you did it on a previous version of OS X, and subsequent upgrades allowed it to still work in Mountain Lion? I'm on a MacBook Pro from 2010 and went from Snow Leopard to Lion to Mountain Lion.

My "spouse" is hovering and insisting that I just do our holiday cards by hand or one by one in Pages, but I am VERY stubborn and want to get this to work.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi,

It doesn't look like the "Country" field on the cards need to match. I changed one of the spouses to a different country and the label (as shown in the print dialogue panel as you suggested) still shows "John Smith and Jane Doe." Most of my country fields are blank.

It does matter that the Country Code be the same for both. After selecting the card and clicking on edit, the Country Code can be checked or changed by clicking on the address label (home, work, etc.) and moving the mouse down to "Change Address Format..." You'll see a long list of countries. If the cards for Jane and John don't have the same country code, the label won't show both names.

The lines of code like:

<key>us</key>

<true/>

in the ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist file determine which countries the related names functionality will work in. Using the plist shown in an earlier post, they need to live in ca (Canada), uk (United Kingdom), us (United States), or fr (France) and both need be be in the same one. Adding other country codes to the plist file should enable that country to work as well (I haven't tried it).

The related names functionality was removed with the release of Snow Leopard (10.6) so I've editied the plist file in 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8. All have worked.

The only other thing I noticed is that the following two lines shown in the earlier post are really one line in the plist file.

As shown in the earlier post, the code:


<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

is really all on one line. Here is a screen shot of my plist file as viewed in TextWrangler:

The good news is we have 358 days to figure this out before Christmas.

Jay

Hello again,

I've been doing this on an iMac that is about five years old. I also have a MacBook Air that is about 1 year old, but I haven't changed Contacts to display related names on it. To verify that it works on new hardware (running 10.8.2), I put the ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist file (see below) into the Contacts>Content>Resources folder. The related names showed up just fine after adding the plist file. John Smith's spouse is Jane Doe, Jane Doe's spouse is John Smith, both have the same address and Country Code.

Here is a screen shot of the plist file:

Jay

This still works with 10.9 (Mavericks)

-Jay

Hi again,

Am running 10.7.5. Tried your solution but it still isn't working for me. Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Rich

That is strange - are you sure the country codes (not the country) are the same for both contacts, the addresses are exactly the same and the spouse fields are correct (no extra spaces, etc.)? Did you have any problems creating the plist and putting it in the Contacts>Content>Resources folder? The plist shown above only includes us, ca, uk and fr. If you need some other country, the code for it can be added to the plist. It looks like this isn't working for some and I know this is just a repeat of the above, but I can't think of anything else to try.

Jay

Hi Jay --

Can you confirm you still have this working on Mavericks? I've tried to reproduce it and can't. Here's how I'm trying to debug this:

1. Created the plist file, UTF-8 encoded, and saved to the Resources folder
2. Created two new contacts in iCloud (Joe Smith and Jane Doe) with the same home address, with "USA" in the country field
3. Manually specified that the home address "Custom Address Format" is "United States"
4. Added Spouse field to each, and entered full name into the respective fields.
5. Selected both contacts
6. Selected Print and choose Mailing Labels in the Style drop down menu.

In the preview pane, both contacts and addresses show up as independent labels.

Is there another preference to set somewhere to turn on the address merging at all?

Ramon

Hi Ramon,

I've updated both computers to Yosemite, so I can't verify that it currently works with Mavericks. It did when I printed labels last December. The only thing I noticed in your post is that you selected both contacts in step 5. You should only select one (like Jane Doe). When you print the label for her it should include both names.

The really bad news is that I just tried to add the plist file to the Resources folder in Yosemite and it doesn't work. I'll continue to research it - if anyone has an idea, please post it.

Jay

Ramon,

Another thing to try is giving them the same last name (e.g., John Doe and Jane Doe) with the address the same on both cards, each spouse included on the other's card, etc.). Select one of them in the list of contacts and print using Mailing Labels. If you picked John's card the label should say John and Jane Doe. If you selected Jane's card, it should say Jane and John Doe. I can't try it to confirm this because it doesn't work at all using Yosemite.

Jay