Mail label printing from Address Book

Question

I am trying to print labels for Christmas cards using the label printing feature in Address Book (Tiger version). The cards in my group include First and Last Names as well as the Spouse Name. Sometimes the label prints with the person name and the spouse in the form: John Doe and Jane. Other times the spouse is left off. I would like consistent behavior. At this point it truly seems random. I've tried deleting cards, rebooting and reentering new cards without effect. Can anyone help?
Does anyone know if the problem is resolved in Leopard? If so, I could convert my MacBook and print from it. I can't convert the MacPro yet because some 3rd party software that I rely on is not yet compatible with Leopard.

Answer 1

I encountered the same issue last year around Christmas time. This is what I learned about how Address Book works when printing labels:
If you have a spouse or child listed on contact card it will print them all on the mailing label IF the first name of each person is unique to your entire address book. For example, if the contact is John Brown and the spouse is listed as Susan Brown and the child is listed as Chester Brown, the expectation is that the label would print as:
John, Susan and Chester Brown
This assumes that there are no other contacts in your address book with the first name of Susan or Chester. However, if, for example, you have another person in your contact list named Susan (the last name could be anything), Address Book will print:
John and Chester Brown
This is because Address Book looks at all the first names in your contact list and if it sees a first name that is also listed in one of the spouse or child fields then it looks to see if the the other contact shares the same address as the contact you are trying to print. If the address is the same, then it prints properly on the label. If not, then it doesn't print on the label. So if you have two Susans - Susan Anderson and Susan Brown - Address book looks at the address on each card and determines that Susan Brown has the same address as the contact you are trying to print (John Brown) and therefore prints her name on the label.
So, to make a long story short, if you want consistent and predictable results when printing your labels you should assign a unique card to each person that you want to appear on the label and make sure that the individual cards have the same address listed on each. So, in the above example, there would be a card for John Brown, a card for Susan Brown, and a card for Chester Brown. On John Brown's card, Susan Brown would be listed as spouse and Chester Brown would be listed as child. Print John Brown's card and you should get:
John, Susan and Chester Brown
Although this makes logical sense, it's not incredibly intuitive and not very well documented by Apple. I was hoping they would enhance Address Book in Leopard since this seems like a feature that a lot of people would use around this time of year. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case this time around.
The next issue that you will probably encounter is what I'm dealing with now: I want to send Christmas cards to the home address of some people on my list and to the business address of others. When printing labels, you can choose to print home addresses, business addresses, all addresses (prints two labels, one for home and one for business) and Distribution List. You can choose your preferred/default mailing address for each contact in your group in the Edit Distribution List menu item. I did this and picked the default address that I wanted for each person on my list. The proper address for each contact should print perfectly when I print labels using the "Distribution List" option. Indeed, all my contacts print to the proper address BUT spouse and child names don't print on any of the cards - they only print when you choose All, Home, or Business!
Good luck!