The LDIF Pocket Address Book Printer

LDIFPrint is a small utility, written in Java^TM, that allows address books saved in LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) to be printed in an 8-up format on a sheet of paper. The printouts may then be cut up and stapled together to form a convenient, pocket-sized address book.

Any address book maintained by Netscape Communicator 4.5 or later may be saved in LDIF format by selecting File | Export... from the Address Book menu. If any entries are also included in lists, make sure first that (1) each of the entries has an e-mail address and (2) all the e-mail addresses are distinct – doing this seems to circumvent a Communicator bug that causes some of the entries to be "lost". If an entry has no e-mail address, enter a bogus one in the form ';;nickname' (and yes, it is always good to provide a nickname for each entry, especially if it participates in a list). LDIFPrint will not print out any e-mail addresses beginning with ';;'.

It is possible that other applications support LDIF output as well; I have not investigated this since I do not use any of them :).

The Print Adj fields visible on the screen shot above allow the physical printout to be shifted so that the sheet of paper is divided into 8 regions of equal size. The units required here are points (1 pt = 1/72"), and roughly correspond to the left and top hardware margins of the output device being used. The values 16 and 9 initially supplied are suitable for several of the Hewlett-Packard laser printers; you may need to adjust them if you're using something else. Your hardware margin settings, as well as the current directory, will be stored in .PROPERTIES files in your home directory and reused across sessions.

The following items are available for download (the usual disclaimers apply):
 

	The LDIF Address Book Printer JAR Executable (Version 1.03: 08-Aug-1999.) Requires a JavaTM 2 (JDKTM 1.2) run-time environment (JRE) implementation, such as the one offered by Sun Microsystems, to be available on the host machine. Under the Sun JavaTM 2 JRE, LDIFPrint may be invoked with the command:   java -jar LDIFPrint.jar [ldif_file] where ldif_file must refer to a valid, existing LDIF file. If no input file is specified, you will be presented with a File Open dialog. If you are using a JavaTM 2 environment from another vendor, please consult the tool documentation to find out how to execute LDIFPrint.jar. Naturally, if the application blows up in your face, please let me know.
	The LDIF Address Book Printer Win32 Wrapper for JAR Executable If you're using 32-bit Windows, simply place this LDIFPrint.exe file in the same directory as the LDIFPrint.jar archive, and make sure it is on your PATH. You may then invoke LDIFPrint from anywhere simply by typing in:   LDIFPrint [ldif_file]
	The LDIF Address Book Printer Source Code (Version 1.03: 08-Aug-1999.) These source files are provided for your single-stepping and debugging pleasure, should you wish to understand what makes LDIFPrint tick. Note that the file ldif.java contained in the distribution is actually generated from the ldif.bertha LDIF grammar that is also supplied. If you'd like to tweak the grammar file in any way, you'll need the TM1.x parser generator, available elsewhere on this site.

(C) Copyright 1998-2002 by Ziemowit Laski. All Rights Reserved.