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

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

Hi,

The only other thing to check is that the Country Code is 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. They would also need to be either Canada, France, the UK or US for it to work.

It's unlikely that they would be different, but I can't think of anything else.

Jay

You have to quit the Address Book (or Contacts in later versions of OS X) before adding the plist file to the Resources folder. It might be a good idea to restart your computer as well. Although I don't think that is needed it couldn't hurt.

You don't need to close and reopen AB after changing the country in "Address Format."

Jay

That's great! Did you quit and re-open Contacts since putting the plist file in Resources? If not, that is probably what fixed it. I think the plist file is read (or run?) when Contacts is opened.

Now if we could figure out why it doesn't work in Yosemite.

Jay

What do you know...

I recreated the plist file and this time is showed up as a plist document on my desktop. When I tried it before the document had a text Wrangler icon. I put the new plist file in the Resources folder (running Yosemite) and it worked!!. I don't know what I did to change the file type.

Jay

Thanks BDAqua,

If tyou can't see the previous attachment, the icon for the file that works is just a blank, white image with PLIST written on it. The one that doesn't work has a big W (for TextWrangler) on it. I'm pretty sure the text from the html from page 1 of this contains lots of hidden characters. If you copy it and paste it into a TextEdit document you'll see that there are what appear to be extra spaces or tabs. If you clean it all up and then save it as a Unicode (UTF-8) file it will work just fine.

-Jay

Awewsome.

I found this solution a few years ago, but this time when I needed it again it wasn't working on Yosemite at first using the exact same file then. But upon recreation of it, it suddenly works for some reason.

Anyways, can we go to the next level of difficulty/challenge? That is...

"John and Jane Doe" works as we know. Also tried adding prefixes and was able to get "Mr. John and Jane Doe", but how about if we want to do Mr. and Mrs. John Doe? At best I've been able to get "Mr. John and Mrs. Jane Doe". As long as you add "Mr."/"Mrs." also to Spouse field, this works. But yeah...it still looks weird. I assume "Dr. John and Mrs. Jane Doe" would also work as well, but then there's now the problem of only being able to get "Dr. John and Dr. Jane Doe" when one would really want "Drs. John and Jane Doe" Oy.

Great, thanks a lot Jay!

Zapping Gremlins did it for me too. Works here on Mavericks with a French Canadian system (two contacts with identical address but different last names).

Another solution can be found at http://tidbits.com/article/14299 but it requires the purchase of the Labels & Addresses app. I include this link because apparently this app adds other functionality, and the article contains a lot of other good information about Address Book/Contacts.

This doesn't work with El Capitan. The Contents > Resources folder is locked so you can't put the ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist file in it. I imagine it's because of El Capitan's System Integrity Protection.

-- Jay

I can confirm that this works in El Capitan, but it is a much harder hack now. To add the ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist file to /Applications/Contacts.app, you need to disable System Integrity Protection (SIP).

1. Boot into Recovery Mode (hold ⌘-R during boot).

2. Start the Terminal app from the "Utilities" menu.

3. Disable SIP and reboot by entering the following command:

csrutil disable; reboot

4. Having disabled SIP, create and copy

ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist

5. Reenable SIP:

csrutil enable; reboot

The example file way back near the start of the thread has one error: the ISO country code for the United Kingdom is GB (Great Britain). Using UK does not get the related names effect.

-- T.M. Wong

Thanks T.M.,

Your solution for disabling SIP works great. I have one small clarification to make - the computer needs to be in Recovery Mode to enable SIP so you need to reboot holding ⌘-R again between steps 4 and 5 (above).

So the process is:

1. Boot into Recovery Mode (hold ⌘-R during boot).

2. Start the Terminal app from the "Utilities" menu.

3. Disable SIP and reboot by entering the following command: csrutil disable; reboot

4. Having disabled SIP, create and copy

ABRelatedNamesConfig.plist

5. Boot into Recovery Mode (hold ⌘-R during boot) again.

6. Reenable SIP: csrutil enable; reboot

The fist one was jpeg, this is tiff Does it show up?

-Jay

Thanks Jay, I was actually wondering why it didn't work for felciano 🙂

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