This may be something analogous to using your car to drive across the street instead of walking, but Scribus is quite useful for making envelopes.
The practical problem is that all the various word processors in Linux are awful with printing envelopes -- they're difficult to figure out how you are supposed to set them up and often don't work well or at all. I use a laptop a lot, which in my case also means I am using printers wherever I can find them -- right now, depending on where I am I may use (these are all HP printers) a 660C, a photosmart, 4000 TN, P4, P4 plus or DJ 500. How each feeds envelopes is very different. I went to the bother of writing a perl program that creates a latex file with the rotating package and converts to Postscript -- it works better than any word processor, but requires different program versions for different printers. Back to Scribus -- Because of this orientation/envelope feeding problem, the envelope size feature in Scribus (e.g. COM10E) isn't very useful for some printers. But Scribus has other features which work very well -- the page guides and the ability to create nonprinting layers. If you check the attached .sla file, this has been set up for a center-feeding Laserjet 4000TN. Since I used an envelope with a return address already on it, it only needs one text frame. The nice thing is being able to tack a nonprinting note on the page to remind me what it was generated for -- you could also make this a multiprinter file by telling where the text frame should go for different printers. An addition to Scribus, useful for envelopes and other things too, would be some buttons in Properties to be able to instantly click rotation to 90, 180, and 270 degrees (and back to 0 for that matter). This would also help editing (until Story Editor gets fixed) since editing is much easier at 0 degrees than 90 (and an upside down text frame acts really weird). Gregory Pittman [Incidentally, there really is a street called Mylanta Place in Louisville -- have *no* idea why; either a developer with a sense of humor or sense of pain in the stomach.] -------------- next part -------------- An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: envelope4000TNlaser.sla Url: http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/attachments/20040216/104f79f1/attachment.ksh
