One of my longtime friends from an online discussion group, Henry from North Carolina, applied this morning to join our beta test team.
I was delighted, as I know Henry has done great work with musical groups in both Atlanta and North Carolina, and I have great respect for his experience and judgement.
In his application, Henry asked, “Will LIDA include the means to print a file label?”
Wow.
I answered him, “Henry, this is EXACTLY the kind of feedback we need from our Beta Test Team – things no one has ever thought of before.”
And that’s true. The concept of printing file labels from LIDA IS something no one has thought of before now, it’s something that could possibly be very useful, and it is an example of exactly the kind of inputs we need from our Beta Test team, and after release, from our users.
LET’S DISCUSS LABELS From LIDA
In thinking about giving LIDA the capability to print file labels, a number of questions come to mind. I’ll list here those questions I thought of right away, and if you have others, you can tell us in a comment below, or over on our discussion forum (currently open only to Beta Testers, but perhaps soon open to all interested parties).- What size labels will these be?
- Will you need multiple sizes? Perhaps one for the end of a box, and a large one for the front?
- Do you print labels already? If so, what process do you use? My group has often used a Dymo label printer with shipping labels to print labels for the front of folders, but that’s a one-at-a-time thing.
- Is it essential that these labels be printed on adhesive label paper, and if so, what kind?
- Will these labels be printed on letter-size sheets with multiple labels, or on roll-type labels such as from a Dymo label printer?
- Is it permissible to simply provide the label information, and have you copy it from LIDA and paste it into a label-printing program?
- What information do we need on these labels?
- Which of this information is mandatory, and which is optional?
- What should be the arrangement and styling of this information? This could be different for different-sized labels
- Do the users need to be able to rearrange the labels themselves, or can the arrangement be fixed?
This might be something we can include before we have the Live Version (1.0.001) release, which we hope will occur in June 2020 or before, or it might be something so complex it needs to wait for a later version release.
We would be very happy to hear your thoughts on this. As I mentioned above, you can tell us your thoughts in a comment below, or on our discussion forum.
For me, the ability to print a file label would solve a huge problem. When I enter a file into my system. I like having info re Tune name, composer, arranger and a one line comment if anything about the tune is special. Normally the comment line would not be printed, but it might be handy to have it print in a report or book list.
A standard file label might be printed from a hot key, whereas a comprehensive listing or “book list” could be printed from a report module (you can see my Dbase roots showing here as that old DOS based database would have one module call another for special reports. ) The ability to organize my paper files would be a big plus.
This is a great idea, and one we should definitely consider including in a future version of LIDA.
We will have to have quite a bit of discussion about the “right way” (or maybe simply the “best” way) to implement this, including decisions on label size, which information to include, and where to put that information on the label. We need to also consider how the labels will be printed – on a standard letter-size sheet with multiple labels (and if so, how do we handle partial sheets), or on a roll-fed dedicated label printer?
Ahhh, so many decisions.
Thanks for the consideration. To me, the ability to print a label would decide in a hurry for me to use something like LIDA instead of a spreadsheet. I am not familiar with what is available in dedicated label printers, and that indeed might be a good way to go. The old DOS based system I used for years had its own dedicated dot matrix printer and of course Msoft killed that off by making the printer impossible to use from the Windows DOS box . One day I had a system that worked and with the adoption of windows I did not.
This is definitely a topic that warrants extensive additional discussion.