Spouse name sometimes does not appear on printed labels - why?

Question

Last year, this forum helped me figure out how to get spouse names onto my Christmas card labels. Thanks! This year, I want to fix a tiny problem that came up last year. For some reason, about 10% of the labels do not include a spouse name, even though I have included the spouse's name in the 'spouse' field on the address card, in the same way as all the other cards. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to why some of the records will print with a spouse's name and others don't.
Any thoughts?
Our solution last year was to hand write the labels for the envelopes that were incomplete. This year, I thought I'd spend at least a few minutes trying to solve the problem before resorting to that.
Thanks!

Answer 1

I have experimented with this a great deal, with great frustration.This is indeed a very bug ridden area of Address Book.
For instance, try the following: pick one of the spouses (similar problems exist when using partners) that won't print, then edit the spouse's name by inserting a period (.) at the front. E.g. change "Larry Stewart" to ".Larry Stewart", then see if the spouse's name appears on a label. Most of the time mine would, but if you take the period out again, you guessed it: no label. What kind of sense does all THAT make????
Also, be aware that the main contact must have both a first and last name.
When working properly, contacts and spouse with the same last name print as "Joan and Larry Stewart." When the last names are different, as typically with partners, you get "Joan Armatrading and Larry Stewart." Quite nice....except when it doesn't work at all, which for me has been about 50/50.
I came on here today to find out if anyone knows of any downloadable or hard copy documentation for Address Book so I could see if there is an actual spec for entering data to print these kind of labels. Sometimes Apple has tech notes about stuff. Has anyone seen or heard of anything like this?
Thanks, Patrick