Cool app of the week: vCard to CSV Converter.
We needed to print custom labels, so we had someone use Apple’s Address Book.app and clean up all the addresses, and then export them all as a .vcf file. From there I used the vCard to CSV Converter (running locally on my machine) to covert the .vcf file into a .csv file. Once that was done, it was pretty trivial to write some Perl-fu to take the .csv file and spit out an XPress tag file we could flow into QuarkXPress so the custom styles were applied. (Hey, we’re designers, we care about things like typefaces, leading, tracking, etc.)
The biggest problem was that I could not create multiple automatic linked text boxes in QuarkXPress 6.5. This is probably a limitation of XPress, but I worked around it by just using a single automated text box and then calculating the size of the lines in the addresses and adding blank lines accordingly. Oh, we also printed them on label sheets that were 8.75 inches by 11.5 inches, just for an added measure of fun.
5 replies on “vCard to CSV Converter”
Another, perhaps simpler option would be to convert the vCards to hCards (several tools can do this), and then style them as you would any other web page.
I don’t think the resulting HTML would have flowed into QuarkXPress very well though. I’ll definitely look at some vCard to hCard converters, as it can get a bit tedious writing hCards by hand.
I was thinking of printing directly from HTML, which can certainly be difficult, but might be more familiar than Quark for some web designers.
That sounds like an interesting challenge. I can see how CSS would give good control, but I don’t know how it might work across multiple pages. Worth a shot next time perhaps.
I came across this tool previous week as I need to import some vCard contacts to the CMS. As naturally I prefer CSV over vCard.
The converter is cool, except that some fields are mapped incorrectly, e.g. work email becomes home email. So I have no options, but to import the vCard into Windows’s Address Book and export CSV (actually tab-separated, not comma-separated) from there…