Let's say you want something a little bit better than a handwritten address for an envelope
for something special.
So you want to print something out.
You can do this one of a few ways on your Mac.
I'm going to show you two.
One, that you may go to right away, is Pages.
Use Pages to print an envelope.
You can do this using one of the Pages templates that's in there.
So when you create a new document it asks you to choose a template.
If you scroll down you'll find a bunch of envelopes.
So I'm going to choose Classic envelope here and I get some prefilled in bits of information
here.
Return address, main address.
I can go in and Edit these and make them what I want.
I can, of course, change things like fonts and maybe make them larger, bolder, whatever
I want to do.
I can also change the type of envelope I'm using.
So I want to measure the envelope and I want to go and see if any of the envelopes under
Page Setup will fit.
The default here is envelope #10.
There's a few others.
Technically you can use Manage Custom Sizes but I haven't had too much success with that.
You're going to have to do trial and error.
If you make it custom size you're probably going to have to print out several different
versions.
Adjust things.
Move things around just to get it right.
In this case envelope 10 fits the bill.
I can go to File, Print and then make some selections here.
One of the things you want to select is under Media & Quality.
There's a media type for my printer and I can choose envelope to tell it that something
thicken is going to go through than a standard sheet of paper.
Also you want to worry about which way is up and which side to print on.
So one of the things that you want to do is use a standard piece of paper and fold it
if you don't want to waste an envelope and kind of mark on it to make it a fake envelope,
feed it through and see exactly which side it's on.
Or if you have a bunch of envelopes you may want to waste one just to see what happens.
Then when you know how to orient the paper as you feed it through the printer you click
Print and you should get a printed envelope.
So I got exactly the results I wanted but your results may vary.
Printers vary on how they handle envelopes and, of course, the envelope size is going
to mean you might run into some trouble.
So you may have to go into this template here and move things around to adjust.
You may need to do things like since this is the body text here you may need to add
some spacing.
I'm just putting some tab there.
Things like that.
So you do what you have to do to get the envelope printed and looking the way you want.
Now another way to do it is to use the Contacts app.
Of course this allows you to print envelopes pretty easily.
If the contact is already there then you don't even have to type the address.
But if not don't be afraid to add a contact temporarily in order to do this.
It's no different really than creating a new Pages document.
So I'm going to do File, New Card, and I'm going to just create a temporary card and
set an address down here.
Hit Done and with that contact selected I'm going to go to File, Print.
The first thing you want to look at here is Style.
Make sure you have Style, Envelopes chosen.
Now you get a ton of options here and this is really interesting.
You can choose a Layout and there's a bunch of different presets.
So you have North American Envelopes and you'll see a lot more here than you did in Pages.
There's International Envelopes and there's Japanese Envelopes.
So a ton of different envelope choices.
I can choose the official 10 here and I can see that the width and the height is pretty
much the number 10 that was in Pages.
But I have a lot of other options as well.
I can choose between inches, millimeters and points for my Units there and I can easily
build my custom envelope.
So I can define a custom envelope.
I'll call it Test.
Now I can edit all this stuff.
So I can edit the width and the height.
I can edit the position and the width and height of the recipient.
The position and the width and height of the sender to customize everything.
When I get it just like I want I can Print.
Of course this is saved as a custom type.
So if it works for me and I have a lot of envelopes of this size I can reuse it.
Then when I'm done with it don't be afraid to delete that contact if you really only
wanted it there to print this envelope.
It's really no different than creating a Pages document to use it once to print an envelope
and then deleting it.
Now if you have a need to do more than just a single envelope here and there you may want
to look into a specialty app.
There are plenty in the Mac app store.
You can use one of these to print larger runs or maybe it's something you need to do on
a regular basis or do it for work.
There's several different apps here so you want to look through them and find one that
fits your needs.