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vCard to CSV Converter

Cool app of the week: vCard to CSV Converter.

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.