Business card design

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 12:43 PM, Ian Weller <ianweller at gmail.com> wrote:
| git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~ianweller/fedora-business-cards.git<http://fedorapeople.org/%7Eianweller/fedora-business-cards.git>

 make
python generate.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "generate.py", line 28, in <module>
    from fedora.accounts.fas2 import AccountSystem
ImportError: No module named fedora.accounts.fas2
make: *** [out.svg] Error 1

Sigh...please add some instructions on what the installed enviroment needs
to have in order to make use of the code. If this has to be done on running
infrastructure hosts, tell me that don't tell me to git clone it.  It's
somewhat frustrating when i'm told to git clone something without any
thought as to instructing me on what the build environment needs to look
like.  git cloning is cool and all... but i'm not going to be very good at
helping develop this further to meet what I expect are the most common user
expectations on the resulting output if I can't actually run the code.


> I never thought of glabels, mainly because I don't use it. When I was
> printing off business cards I put the SVGs in Inkscape and produced a
> PDF, which I then printed. Each to his own.
>

When you have a hammer...everything is a nail.

I think it takes a special sort of person to reach first for inkscape to
print out sheet labels. I don't expect most people will think to do that to
be quite honest with you. Printing out business cards, and label sheets in
general, falls completele inside the realm of mundane office tasks,,and as
such people are going to reach for something that doesn't bill itself in our
menus as a graphics editting tool to do it.  OpenOffice.org or even glabels
will be the first things users end up reaching for because they bill
themselves as office apps and understand how to handle different label
sheets.. if they can't just get a pdf and print that.

I also think you have to be prepared to support different sized business
card stock somewhat flexibly. If you are using a generator.. you should
really think hard about lifting glabel's support for its list of predefined
manufacture labels by brand and number which are a set of xml files.  Can
you use them as is in your generator and expose a selection dialog similar
to how glabels does it?

Expose the template selection and ask people to generate a card sheet PDF
that works for the labelsheet that they have access to to print on. No svg,
no png.. a PDF that works with the sheet stock they have to print on.  You
do that, and you've basically removed the need for anyone to tweak the
layout at all locally in glabels or inkscape or anything. It will print from
evince..which is installed by default even in our live cds.


-jef
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/attachments/20080813/85dd13a6/attachment.htm>