Re: Tractor/sheet labels (Reuben Lee) Stephen Clark 29 Oct 1998 15:21 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 09:53:50 -0500 From: Reuben Lee <reuben@law.umab.edu> Subject: Tractor/sheet labels Please allow me to apologize for the tardy reponse to your email, which was forwarded to me by Pam Bluh for an answer. I think that the key is to have an "ideal" label product clearly in your mind, and to work backward, providing the appropriate support necessary to achieve the desired result. Here we are dedicated to the Se-lin label system marketed by Gaylord. We have also been a WordPerfect facility, and those parameters have set some of the large issues of how we produced spine labels. When I first arrived at Technical Services, spine labels were produced by hand entry on a Quietwriter 7, produced before IBM went out of the office typewriter business. But with foresight, it had been provided with an ASCII interface. So my first machine labels worked by entering a WordPerfect5.1 (for DOS) file, saving the file as an ASCII text file, and printing (after appropriate initialization) on the Quietwriter...voila.... Subsequent to this, we convinced our OCLC cataloguers to save the spine labels produced by OCLC entry (I believe they are S1 saves) to disk in ASCII format. I produced a set of macros for WP5.1 that eliminated excess blanks, leading blanks, arranged the labels in a single row, and saved the result for the Quietwriter. That is still the backbone of the system here...add copies are entered by keystroke, but in a WP5.1 file, OCLC output is machine-vetted & sent to the printer. Fears about the health and safety of the Quietwriter prompted a look at other methods. Like you, I had misgivings about using tractor-fed single strips. Simple printers are also becoming harder to find. I started to fool around with using an old laser printer (HPIID) that had at one time been outfitted with an outrageous amount of memory (at similar expense), but was lying unused. I used 6.1Wordperfect, because it had a beautiful label program, and, I discovered, by defining Hard Pages while in WP5.1, I could make the labels "snap" into place when the file was put into 6.1. I have been using Gaylord 695 labels with the laser II. Now I must acknowledge that there are some shortcomings to all this. The label backing MUST be produced out of the rear door on the laser II so that the labels do not flex after they have been softened by the fuser. The present limit is about a five-line label using 11pt Arial Bold as the typeface. But the vast majority of our labels fall into this category. 6.1WP labels also let you run blank labels before or after the one or two you wish. I don't do this much..a single label I might still produce on the keyboard of the Quietwriter. But I do try to batch my label production as much as possible, and often this works out well for the 20 labels to a sheet of the 695 material. Our Quietwriter still works well, it has been carefully maintained, and Lexmark still has supplies and service for it. It may last for years unless the supplies start to dry up or GUI interfaces finally make ASCII a forgotten animal. Those who know tell me that Corel 7 & 8 WordPerfect should work as well as 6.1 for that part of the program..I used 6.1 because that was what I could get my hands on when I had the time to do the developement. I would be more than happy to help with further details or opinions..but I must tell you that my time at the present address soon comes to an end with retirement scheduled for 1November. E-mail sent to me at 112136,1161@compuserve.com will work for the foreseeable future, however. I hope these comments help, and apologize once again for the delays in answering. Reuben R. Lee Marshall Law Library