Editing Steiner Pages - Libreoffice Vs. Scribus

Ok, I made a blog post about this here:

http://stamphacks.com/wp/?p=925

The gist of things is that Libreoffice/Openoffice will change the centering of your text and you'll need to manually tweak stuff. Scribus preserves the text spacing, but won't let you edit the text.

Here is the blog post redone here:

Ok, in case you don't know, there's an awesome site known as stampalbums.com. A gentleman by the name of Bill Steiner sells album pages as PDFs for almost every country in the Scott Catalog.

But, unlike me, Bill only provides PDFs for you to download and print. But what if you wanted to modify these pages in some way?

If you want to do minor edits and don't want to spend hundreds of dollars and software, you can use either Libreoffice or Scribus to edit the PDFs. What you choose to use, really depending on your needs.

Let's go over the pros and cons of each solution

LibreOffice Draw

If you want to edit the text of the Steiner Pages, LibreOffice is your best bet. However there is one drawback: centering of text. Let me demonstrate by showing you this screenshot of a file opened in Libreoffice. This is Bill Steiner's Ukraine 2013 supplement, page 1:



Ok, there are a few things you should notice about this picture. Tree Leaves and Fruit is outlined in blue, because I clicked inside the text to edit it. Here is where you'll have some work to do:

The text "Tree Leaves and Fruit" is not centered inside the box it is in
The font in the upper left hand corner (Helvetica) is italicized

So, here is where the problem comes in. The font is shown italicized, because you don't have the font installed that Bill used when he designed the page. At least I don't.

The other problem is that, since the text is not centered inside the text box, it is no longer centered on the page. Depending on which page you edit, this is sometimes more noticeable than on other pages.. So, if you're as anal retentive as I am when it comes to this stuff, you need to clean it up by shrinking the text box and re-centering everything.

Before:



After:



The difference in this example is small, but for some of the text on these pages it can look pretty bad. But, if you want to edit text and use one of these free tools. Libreoffice is the only way to go.

Which, of course, will let you do other fancy stuff, if you want:



Scribus

Now, if you're planning to do something like get rid of the border and don't feel like editing and re-centering a ton of text, then Scribus may be the way to go.

Here's the same page opened in Scribus:



The reason why the whole thing is pink, is because I selected it. Scribus keeps the whole page grouped. Press Shift+CTRL+G to ungroup it:



So, notice the box around each individual letter? That's because Scribus imports each letter individually, rather than one text box.

So, what do you get from this?

Well, you lose the ability to edit the text, but the text stays right where Bill Steiner put it. So, everything is still centered.

The only thing this is horribly useful for is removing the border without having to recenter all the text on the page:



Useful if you're going to print on someone else's pages that have a border already.

If there are other free ways to open and edit these files, please let me know and I will add to this page.

Andy -- Thanks very much for explaining this and writing it up. I really appreciate it!

-- Dave

Does it make sense? I tend to talk over people's heads when I write this kind of stuff

Andy -- I just went through your explanation more carefully and I'm pretty sure I follow it, but I have also used page-layout software in the past (even going back to when it was Aldus Pagemaker!), although I rarely do so today.

I do appreciate your doing the test and documenting to show why Scribus is not the right choice to edit text, and I especially appreciate that you found the undocumented exploit feature in it, though, to delete the borders without losing the text-centering on the page.

A couple of follow-up questions:

(1) If someone just wanted to change the border style to a different type, which application would you recommend?

(2) If someone were starting from scratch in drawing up a page, which application would you recommend?

Thanks!

Thanks for the information - I never realized that LibreOffice changed the spacing of text causing it to be off-center. I was just modifying pages from StampAlbums.com and used your advice.

1. If I wanted to change the border style, I personally would use Scribus. In Scribus you can delete all the borders and then go edit the master page, add a border there, and it will flow onto all the pages without you needing to add a border to each page individually.

2. This one is a tough call.I spent a good deal of time learning Scribus and I really like the flexibility it gives me. But it's not just something you can grab and go with. But I would think that a Desktop Publishing solution will beat out anything else in the long run.

If your needs are simple, you can get away with making custom pages using the free Stamp Page Creator: http://stamppagetor.sourceforge.net/

It doesn't really change the spacing. The text box is still centered. The issue is, that you don't have the exact same version of Helvetica that Bill uses installed on your computer. So the font doesn't fill the text box. And the annoying part is that selecting the text box and centering the text does not work. I think that's a bug with LibreOffice. I should file a bug report with them.

Thanks, Andy, for your informed opinion on this.

Really appreciate it!