Steiner Pages With Back To Back Binding

For Czechoslovakia, I plan to experiment with two sided printing if anything to keep the number of pages down since I have way too many binders already.

I used PDFexchange to shift the contents on even pages with one action.

I was also able to change the fonts with 1 action.

Angore, this is similar to what I do.

I'm sure collectors with technical skills I lack will find this pretty elementary, but I use PDFCandy to save my Steiner PDF pages as Word documents so I can alter them. This allows me to change the type fonts and do some minor editing. It also lets me remove the borders so I can I print the layouts on blank Scott Specialty pages which I like. Blank except for their borders, of course.

Why do this at all? Because Scott pages don't label what the stamps are about but Bill Steiner's pages do. With Scott, we're supposed to stare at the tiny type on each stamp and translate it into English in order to know why that stamp was issued? For me, that's not very workable, hence my preference for Bill Steiner's identifying information for each stamp or set of stamps. I use his layouts to get that.

I also prefer better type fonts than his, so I change them. For the country name, I use the Scott-like Engravers MT - size 14 and for everything else Bodoni 72 - size 10. I do the latter first with "Select All". Then I change the country name on each page one-by-one. Sometimes I need to use the drop down menu under "Layout" to move things left or right to get them lined up properly. That took me some experimentation to figure out (at my age!), and It can get a little fiddly at times.

Removing page borders also goes one page at a time. But it all goes pretty quickly. I think borderless pages look much more elegant than small-sized pages with borders -- so that was one option I considered, but since I print mine onto bordered Scott Specialty pages I use that border, and that way they all harmonize. Angore, you might see if you like the borderless look better on your pages.

If I had a large-format printer, I'd print my altered pages directly onto Scott blanks, but I don't. So I print them on normal printer paper, take them to Fedex, and copy them onto blank Scott pages one by one. That does take some time.

Moving items around on the Word pages isn't very workable, though I have tried. But I can omit things I don't want to collect. Sometimes changing fonts moves boxes up and down too much. But I usually can delete any new space to move them back up or down -- or I can select the extra space and choose a smaller font size for it which also moves the box a little. It gets a bit frustrating at times, but the result is much nicer-looking pages. Well, that's what I think, anyway.

Now that I've done this for years, I've ended up with a few dozen improved Scott albums that look a little more elegant than my others which use regular Scott pages and more elegant than plain old Steiner pages. I also have a few (more expensive) Davo and Lighthouse albums but those I'm leaving alone.

Whatever you do, have fun!

I should add (even more!) that "back-to-back" printing can get a bit crazy. I think most modern photo-copiers can hold pages printed on the front only until they're read to print on the back of each page. I think. And how the machine knows which are the fronts and which are the backs, I don't know. Probably you feed all the fronts first, then the machine stops until you feed all the backs? That would make sense. But when I've tried whatever you need to do, I've found it can easily get all messed up.

When I've wanted back-to-back printing only occasionally, I've ended up doing it one page at a time which is about as laborious as laborious gets. If you find a way to do two sides on each page reliably well, let us know.

I printed pages and started mounting stamps. It is straight forward to print back but one has to remember you have to print odd-even range to preserve back to back. It is still a PDF. As for converting the fonts, I found some pages messed up likely because the Palatino font metrics are different than Arial and Helvetica. Steiner used both. I had better results with LibreOffice Draw on changing fonts but that adds another step. The most time consuming task is adding catalog numbers but that is optional. Next time I will put the even page number of left.

The conversion process (shift even page content) and change can be done in less than 30 seconds for the entire PDF. I do take Steiner PDFs and merge into 1 file one. His method of small groups goes back to the modem days.

The back to back makes handling pages a little tricky when handling but once I got them in a 3 ring binder, it worked fine.