[Evolution-users] Viewing selected data from contacts

[Milan Crha]

On Sun, 2022-12-04 at 13:23 +0100, Mark Stanton wrote:
> I can filter with a category but I haven't been able to either find a
> way to limit which items appear, and print just the information
> without the label, or control how many get printed on a "page" (in
> this case "envelope").  There are envelopes in the paper list, and a
> way to create new layouts, so that's not an issue.

	Hi,
I'm afraid there is only a very limited way to influence what will be
printed. You get much better results when you export your address book
into a format which software like LibreOffice can consume and print in
a reasonable way.

There are address book print definitions under
/usr/share/evolution/ecps/ but how precisely that works I do not know.

With respect of the export, the Evolution itself offers saving only as
a vCard, which can save whole books or the selected contacts only, but
it's not suitable for the LibreOffice or similar software. There's
better to use comma-separated values, I believe. You can export a whole
book with:

   /usr/libexec/evolution-data-server/addressbook-export

where you can use `-l` to get list of your books, then you use it as:

   /usr/libexec/evolution-data-server/addressbook-export --format=csv \
      BOOKID

where the BOOKID is the first column of the `-l` output. The actual
path to the addressbook-export binary can differ in your distribution.

Though, thinking of it, LibreOffice can read contacts from your address
books, they do talk to the evolution-addressbook-factory. Where exactly
it's "hidden" I do not recall.

> It looks like a plugin would be the avenue to do this, but the Gnome
> Evolution Plugins page (why does this page have the address
> gnome.eu.org???) has very few plugins.  I found another Evolution
> plugins page for Debian which has a lot.  Neither have anything
> relevant to my need here.  The Debian plugins seem to be included in
> the package?

I wasn't aware there is any page listing available Evolution plugins.

> Is the Debian package different?

Being it a prebuilt package, it's always about the dependencies. If
it's built against dependencies you do not have available in your
system, then you cannot run the binary.

	Bye,
	Milan