A Worldwide Open Source Album

Do you have links, I will be more than happy to have a look, because as for now I never see what I would like to use. In case you don't notice many many many peoples try to find solutions for their Scott Int. missing spots for their stamps.





Of course, you can't please everyone. Some will never get please and always ask for thing and never contribute. What I see is a basic structure that peoples can fits to their needs. Many peoples are afraid to start to design an album fitting their need, we have to provide a base and tutorial, so what we offer can be adapted.



Since now I have a real keyboard I'm gone extend on the vision.

If someone plan to collect all the stamps of the world then he can choose Steiner pages, they are easy to modify too, you can add or remove stuff.

For my needs I need a simplified version of it. I want an example of each stamps , not 5 versions with only paper watermark and perforations as difference, this is an important point. I don't want to set a CV limit for the stamps included , it's so easy to remove the one we don't need, we just click on the box and delete and rearrange the others on the same row. Now as for the BOB or mix of semi and air, it's very simple, when all the box , description are done for a country it take only few hours to make 2 versions.

I don't see the point, as you said,there's already Steiner pages that one can easily modify how they want. Why reinvent the wheel.

Since I have the keyboard I'm gone reply to Don who make a nice contribution to the tread. Forst thing first, I'm not the kind of guy to host a website on a 5mb adsl with only 640mb of upload at home.

I think peoples see the thing way too big and complex than I see it. For now I'm looking at a way to organize more professionally my albums pages for the countries I like to collect. I invest a lot on catalogue recently, books like "The United States Two Cent Red Brown of 1883-1887" , "the 3c Stamp of the United States 1851-1857 Issue by Carroll Chase" and other similar. So I said to my self all that stuff is lost if I use it for myself. Others peoples collect other countries so I get the idea to regroup few persons who share the same vision, pay for the hosting ( not a big deal I put it on my company expense ) We do something simple with list of countries and link to the download. I give a ftp user name ans password to contributors, they upload their pages and I just do the links . Nothing very complicated. Someone update his pages, he check the links and if there is a problem I correct it. What should make a difference is the persons who make the pages of a country will know it well, it will not be an album only fallowing the Scott #

Now if no one want to do things, I proceed anyway, the choice will be way more limited.

Area66, a few links for your consideration:

Postmaster's Scribus/OpenOffice:
https://goscf.com/t/32942

Jason's XML2PDF:
http://www.stampboards.com/viewtopi...98&hilit=xml

Both provide the users the flexibility to alter the design, by keeping the data layer somewhat separated from the presentation layer.

Edit: I just revisited Postmasters thread. It seems you know it already.

I know my English is not good, but I don't see why peoples insist on the phrase " reinvent the wheel " I just want to rearrange the stamps in a more intelligent way, Steiner just put box after box fallowing the catalogue without asking himself if it make sense. . Many many of his titles are not very descriptive of the stamps under. As exemple SG 437, 438, 439 are semi-postal for the "Tuberculosis Relief Fund" Steiner title them "Child with symbols of peace and others". Because he copy the description in the Scott catalogue. We see it's a kid on the stamp no need to put it on the title, the description of SG is more representative. In 1913 Hungary make a nice series with label title "Flood Charity stamps" in SG, Steiner put "Turul" and St. Stephen's Crown, Franz Josef I" of course after 10 pages with the same description, you start to know it's Josef 1 on the stamps , but why this semi ????? you need again to go look in a catalogue.

So this is the Steiner page that I have to redo and scrap the mounts







The new version will look more like this one , image, denominations and colors are missing

Classic, of course I know and tried Scribus, perfect to make a technical stamps pages.

area66,
Don't let the challenges of a project like this bother you, simply understand them and work to resolve them. I am sorry that you feel I 'over exaggerate' or am making it too complex, that was not my intention. I was trying to help you with the possible scope of work for a project like this. I have 25 years of experience managing development projects that ranged in size from 2-3 software engineers to several hundred people spread across many states. One of our projects wrote the USB driver for Linux. If you use Linux and plugged in a USB device chances are good that you used this software.

You are indeed correct about the scope; you can go off and do this yourself. I have tried several group projects with stamp folks. Right now I have three of them running, two are 'one man' projects and the 3¢ 1851-57 Plating Initiative project has 3 other kind people contributing. One of the projects is for kids stamp games; this is something where we had a lot of people posting and talking about it. But when it came to having anyone help, I ended up doing it myself.

I am doing another project for APS right now, a World Wide Stamp Identifier. It has a large SQL database backend, many web pages as the front end, and a whopping 3000 stamp images. I will easily have 100 hours in scanning stamp images alone. There are other online resources which are World Wide Stamp Identifiers so some folks might say "you ware reinventing the wheel". But this is not true as long as the new effort makes improvements over what exists. 'Reinventing the wheel' means that a person is doing an equivalent to something that exists, if you have a better idea or methodology than it does not apply.

I guess my misunderstanding came with the description of 'open source'. I took it to mean a community or group development which is often the case with 'open source'. But you can have an open source project which is not group development, you simply release all the source files. Note: this is another reason why the Steiner effort is not open source. I do not think he offers the original source files but rather he offers only compiled files (PDF).

I applaud your efforts and encourage you to push forward even if it turns out to not be a group development. Try to use the 'lowest' possible dominator file format so that it remains viable for the longest possible time. The simplest format is always the best. For example, a person would never want to develop content in a Microsoft Word format, plain text is far better. In 100 years from now who in the world would have a copy of Word to load them? If it is all in text format then anyone can take it in any direction they want decades from now. I encourage you to consider .XPS format.

Burn your entire project off to DVDs or other long term media often. Join me in helping APS develop a digital specification so that we can all contribute digital resources to an entity that will last longer than ourselves. Your company, you and me, and even this forum are probably not going to be around 50 years from now. If you want the hundreds of hours of work you invest to be useful far into the future the things I outlined are important and form part of the essence of a open source effort.

If this is not what you think you want to do, please still push forward with whatever you can muster. Let me know if there is anything I can do.
Don


PS - Full respect for being multi-lingual!

Anyway, I look forward to seeing what comes out of this.

As a European (and thus fan of Michel), I agree that air/semi-postal should be included instead of putting them in the back as Scott/Steiner does.

Thanks Don, actually Steiner was releasing the files in native Pagemaker 6.5 with a tutorial on how to do new pages from scratch, I think he switch to InDesign and stop to distribute the PageMaker one at that moment , I do have them in VM with Windows XP as PageMaker don't work in 7 and up, the pages are up to 1999 . I'm supporting Steiner sine 12 years at least. I order CD regularly, I don't want to go in the pain to select all the new release...let's fire VMware Workstation to see ­......






here the design kit with a tutorial in PDF

Ah yes, but those files come as a paid product. Open source implies free access to the original source files. Even offering compiled files (i.e PDF) for free does not make it open source.

It is confusing because so many companies offered Linux as a paid product. These were versions which often included better installations routines, documentation, desktops, and/or support. But at the end of the day, people were paying for core files in which they could download the source code for free.
Don

I have to say, as someone who designs his own pages and gives them away, I love the idea of this. My pages involve a lot of research, because I add descriptions and stamp images. But that may be the beauties of an open source project. Two sets of pages, one "basic" and one "deluxe."

Steiner does great work. But you can't edit his page to suit your needs. It's really quite frustrating. I know he made his PageMaker files available sometime in the distant past. But in 2016 there is no easy way to open them. PageMaker hasn't be released in years and doesn't work on Windows 8.x or 10. I'm not even sure it works on Windows 7. Adobe InDesign had it's ability to open PageMaker files removed, so that's not an option any more.

And when I did finally get an old copy of InDesign from work and managed to open the files, I couldn't do much with them. I couldn't export to a another format. I couldn't even cut and paste the contents of the file into Scribus or LibreOffice.

This thread has inspired me. I am going to try and setup Scribus with Github tonight and see how well it works.

http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/How_...with_Scribus

Found this guide for Windows/MacOS X. Need to try this on Linux.

To have others find typos and be able to fix them would be awesome.

Andy,

Any chance you can send me one of the PageMaker files? I'd like to do some testing.

Area66, as a page designer myself, I like this project. Though my main tools are Microsoft Publisher and AutoCAD.

That's the first question that needs to be answered. What software are you going to use to make the files? If you choose MS Publisher, all the Mac people are out. If you choose InDesign, all the home enthusiasts are probably out.

I obviously have a preference for Scribus, because it runs anywhere and I know it. But I'm sure a lot of people are not going to want to learn a new app.