Making My Own Album

Google translate is your friend and in the case og Hungary they have a small history of their stamp in English and also a Table of word. the Vj refer to the Watermark ( vízjelek ) They have 2 pages of it

Actually I started a tread on an Open Source Album and also In Country specialized album

both are related, I will like to have a group of persons working of an international album , but not copying Scott like Steiner's do, something more local to each country, this is why we need peoples with knowledge of that country and usually those peoples have country specialized books.

Trade AlbumGen pages .... since you can't sell AlbumGen made pages without a special license, I don't think the user license allow to trade them.

I had a similar challenge. I collected Straits Settlements and used a local reference catalogue and Stanley Gibbons and ended up using Steiner's pages so missing spaces when I mapped SG/local to Scott.

I probably did a review of it but was looking at Scibus.

Al

Modifying Steiner's pages with a software like Libreoffice draw is probably the easiest way to go. I do it all the time, adding few boxes moving the others

I also believe modifying Steiner pages is the easiest way to go, though not a lot easier than starting from scratch if you are doing a reasonably complex country using the specialized catalogs. The potential disadvantage to using Steiner for a base is in redistribution, likely his copyright would supersede your changes so you could print and sell commercially or swap with others who have not purchased Steiner files.

But then, I use a scan of the Scott Specialty border on my modified Steiner pages because I like the look, but it also means I'm violating copyright... If I were to decide to distribute my pages someday I'd have to change the border to something original and get permission from Bill Steiner.

I print my pages on 70# text weight paper cut and drilled to match the size of the Scott International pages and use surplus binders to house them. It's amazing how many binders a dealer can empty for you. :)

I was thinking the same thing, about trading Albumgen pages. The main problem there is that the images would need to be transferred as well. I have had Albumgen for many years and through many different computers. If the file location is not the same, the images are lost. So I put all the image files in a folder in the program files/Albumgen. That way I never had to change the location again. I did that once and learned a hard lesson. The only think I do not like about Albumgen is that you cannot copy one page from an album and paste it in another. I have redid page 1 of my Hungary album 6 times. The page keeps disappearing. (I think my cat walking on my keyboard may be the cause.) I cannot load a backup copy and copy the page over. Not even if two instances are open. That causes an error that wipes out the entire document. I have my albums backed up in 4 different hard drives.

I have always dreamed of the idea of a collaborative online free world stamp album, where groups of people own different countries and update it, in a Wikipedia-like community effort.

Your observations on using specialized catalogs is spot on. For my Ukraine pages, Scott was tad lacking when it came to definitives, and I ended up using MICHEL.

I started on Ireland, and I hit a HUGE roadblock when it came to the 1997 (I think it's 1997) bird definitives. I had both Scott and Stanley Gibbons Ireland. I ended up contacting friends and getting a copy of MICHEL Ireland. When comparing the 3, none of them agreed on the bird definitives. Someone suggested I use the Hibernian catalog, but I did not have access to that catalog.

Andy,

I ran into the same problem with the Irish birds. I made pages to map the Hibernian catalog. It was the arrangement that made the most sense to me.

Now, I've boxed myself into a corner. Nobody lists by Hibernian catalog number! So I'm back to sifting through Scott for catalog numbers to fill my empty spaces.

Lesson: If you use a specialized or specific country catalog, be sure you can track your stamps back to catalogs that everyone uses.

Dan

I purchased the Steiner CD several months ago and have been transferring my collection from the various old albums, stock pages, stock cards, glassines, etc., to Steiner pages. When I get to an area where Steiner is deficient (mainly varieties), I break out the specialized catalog (if I have it, or I try to locate one on the internet for sale) and create my own pages to supplement or replace the Steiner pages. My goal is not to fill every space, but to make sure every stamp in my collection has a space.

Robert

Good plan Trainwreck, for country specialized catalogue don't expect to much sale, I pay $ 92 for the Chile one and peoples on ebay was asking $ 150 for it. Supplement Steiner's is definitively the easiest solution. We need to group peoples together. As example for now I have finished the first pages of Hungary, for the rest I use Steiner's , I have made nice Czechoslovakia first pages too. I now working on Austria and Hungary revenues. I will make the page available. even if someone don't want to use my pages, he can use it as reference to make his own. Even virtual one; most of the job will be done.

I am curious about the preference for organizing stamps on new album pages.

I prefer to have definitives with common designs from multi-years together rather than scattered as released. I was looking at some Steiner pages and he had them scattered and even in the same year he grouped the self-adhesive versions separate from the water activated. I would also do series like Great Americans.

I like the organization like this but I am ok with less details...just the basics. I tried to contact Jim but no luck.

http://album.dweeb.org/pages/1883_1.html

I did edit Steiner's pages with Adobe Acrobat to add Scott numbers as I experiment with the best approach of where I start.

Al

Al,

I also had a lot of false starts deciding on how to organize my collection. I finally settled on Mystic pages for US and Steiner pages for the remainder.

Like you, I prefer definitives with common designs to be grouped together. Because Steiner follows the Scott Catalog number order with little additional information, too big a deviation would be confusing. In those instances I edited the pages to suit me.

Good luck with your experimentation!
Dan

I, too, group definitive stamps in a single series together on one or more pages, usually in denomination order (but not necessarily so; it all depends on the series).

As an example, I recently made custom album pages for some Denmark definitives, based upon the organization in the Facit catalog, not Scott.

Robert

Edit: Corrected grammatical error.

That is exactly where I am today but now want to at least do the definitives like I prefer as a minimum since I have a number of Great American minor issues to mount. Mystic has a less packed format, not mixing definitives with commems as much on same page, so easily to segregate groups. This is a plus.

Al

That's a future problem for me. I want to expand the Liberty Series to include wet/dry, large/small holes etc.. The issue with Mystic, of course, is the facing page text.

I haven't tried it yet, but I have three approaches that I'm going to try. My first approach is to make up pages and print them on blank Mystic pages and insert them between the text on the Liberty Series and the first page of stamps. If I don't like that, I'm going to try what Andy has done (there are threads on this) and hack the text on the opposing page, print the pages I want and then put the hacked facing page (in my case the 1955 Commemoratives text) where it belongs. If all else fails, I'll just create a specialty mini-album.

Maybe this will trigger some ideas for you.

Keep us posted!

Dan