Business card design

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 13:19 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 
> 
> 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
>  
>  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.

It's the "python-fedora" package, you could just ask. ;-)

>         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.

Having at least a few PDFs available for some of the different standard
aspect ratios would definitely be a big plus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_card#Dimensions

I'm not going to hinge a decision on whether those are ready, though,
especially since the design seems flexible enough for all the aspect
ratios shown there.  There are all sorts of crazy business card formats
out there, after all.

Here's the Glabels DTD in case it helps:
http://glabels.sourceforge.net/doc/glabels-2.2.dtd.txt 

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/attachments/20080813/dc80adc6/attachment.bin