China Headache

This has 'long day' written all over it. I know I brought this up before but I must bring it up again. some time ago a friend gave me a huge accumulation of China - approx half a shoebox of loose off-paper stamps. This week another chappie gave me two sandwich bags packed with loose, off-paper China. I have finally decided to start on my China seriously this morning and I have just spent a good hour looking for the first one. I have searched my Scott for this stamp under teapot, jar, bottle, red-violet, pink, rose, and ceramic and I still have not found it. Seriously, folks, there must be a better way. You would think that with 'Republic of China' all over it, it would be a piece of cake. Not for me, for some reason.



These stamps are beautiful and I have enough to put together a really good starter and then some. I hate to give up and give them away. So, please, help me learn how to make an apparently difficult identification job easier. All help appreciated in advance.

You searched Taiwan, did you?

Edit: Yeah, I know. Stupid question.

It's a snuff bottle! Scott 2734, Republic of China, issued August 9, 1990.

Battlestamps:
Thank you. Why my pdf-search-engine did not pick it up on 'bottle' search is beyond me.

Yes, the search function does not catch all occurrences in the Scott pdf files. I do not know why, but it probably has to do with the layout that Scott uses. Also, the search function goes horizontally across the columns, instead of going down vertically for each column.

Tony and/or khj,
can you give me a quick "searching scott *.pdf for dummies"
lesson please.
How would I do the search for "bottle" and China in this example?
Does it search the entire base? or can you make it country specific?
Thanks

how do you get a scott pdf????

I shall reply to stampvirgin first and Rod second:
To get a Scott pdf one has to buy a digital scott.
It comes in 12 cds or 3 dvds. My 2005 cost about $600 and I have no idea if the price has gone up or down since then.
PDF search: In Acrobat reader 9 (free) which I have but I don't use, you select "search" in "edit" and then search either in one file or in a whole folder of files.
In my Foxit Reader the process is the same but, in my humble opinion, a lot quicker.
I have no idea, the truth be told, wheter Acrobat is more or less accurate than Foxit because I have it in my machines but I have never used it. One of these days I shall make a comparison just for fun and report the results.

wow.. the pdf sounds more expensive then the actual albums.

I've complained way too much on this board about Scott software pricing, so I'll give it a rest this time.

The software price has been reduced over the years. In the past couple of years, the software price is about $5+ cheaper per volume than the print catalog price (if you buy from Amos). I do not know the price for the 2011 software catalogs.

When using the software search with Scott files, make sure you click the top of the page if you have been browsing (I don't know why it makes a difference, but in my experience it does). Also, if you are sure it's there but the search doesn't find it, then do a reverse order search and sometimes it will find it (again, I don't know why it makes a difference). I'm sure all of this has to do with how Scott arranged the multi-column format.

Envy envy envy envy envy envy envy - I haven't had much luck at all in finding bulk Chinese stamps.


I used to have problems with searching on my Scott 2005 digital edition - it would fail to find text strings that I could see on the screen in front of me. But when I clicked on the text to bring up the text cursor and then used the right arrow key, the cursor wouldn't always follow the text correctly. If the text was printed in a font that was too small, it would occasionally jump down a line for a letter or two and then return to the line from which it came. When I switched from Acrobat 7 to Acrobat 8 (released in 2007, I think), that seemed to no longer be a problem.

I had no problem finding "bottle" in my Scott 2005 using Acrobat 8.

Ryan

I know little about Scott catalogues and even less about the digital version, but it seems to me that to buy a database for that price you would want to be able to perform efficient searches on it. Its not rocket-science technology. Is it a case of a provider having what amounts to a monopoly and therefore not having to try very hard to please its customers?
I am quite frustrated on your (Scott users') behalf..!

Actually customer service is quite good. The product was originally pretty good, until they put in the security restrictions. The real problem is with their business model/strategy with regards to the software.

It's just a case of Amos being unbelievably stupid. They have pretty much handed over the market to software pirates, unfortunately. Once that happens, it's very difficult to claim the market back -- so unless Scott drops the prices drastically and drops the useless "security" restrictions, more and more users will be using the pirated software (please note, I DO NOT condone this; I am pretty picky about buying legally licensed software). Amos has to realize that many are unwilling to spend hundreds of dollars on a software catalog with major use restrictions, when they can get pirated software for less than a few tens of dollars, that have all the security restrictions removed.

Meanwhile, because of the security restrictions, I no longer buy Scott software unless it is a rock-bottom clearance price (and, of course, it has to be genuine). I mentioned this before, but the great majority of Scott software being sold online are pirated, not genuine. Know what you are getting before you dish out the dollars. Their current retail price is simply stated, unreasonable.

Sorry, I know, I went through my rant again...

k

I feel your pain!
But I'm sorry to set you off. Please take a some deep breaths and then sooth yourself by looking at some calming stamps.

Absolutely! When you realize that the the reason why the Scott Catalogue has gotten so expensive over the years is the cost of printing a multi-thousand page volume, now in color, and that by contrast, digital copies take virtually nothing to produce, you know they've simply lost their sense of reality. They are not selling a digital product, they are selling rights.

Waaaahhhh! I'm on a road trip far away from my stamps!