[thelist] age old question: how to deal with addressbook export

[张韡武]

Hello. Recently I was working on an company directory project where the
backend uses LDAP to store  contact (and other information) of several
thousands of companies. The project is done in php.

Now the requirement is to export the contact data. I think of CSV. But I
am not sure how I will handle language information and/or multiple
values of LDAP, e.g. the company have 3 addresses and each of them have
3 languages. Perhaps I should export to some spreadsheet format so that
I can use different tabs for different languages. 

Also the requirement is to print lables for the contacts (openoffice and
mailmerge come to my mind) and print addressbooks. I think there must be
tons of applications that can print beautify addressbook from a CSV,
LDIF or vCard source, but I am not confident that some (or all) of them
can deal with Chinese ideographs. Any suggestions? I think the best
possibility is to directly generate the addressbook in PDF format on the
web, if not possible, ask the user to use a desktop application to make
use of the exported file is also acceptable. 

Thank you for your help!