Album Page Software Poll

Other: Stamp Page Creator.
Extremely basic page creator, for my cinderellas, and ephemera.
Most would find clunky.

Contras: Adding text to stamp mount squares almost impossible.

http://stamppagetor.sourceforge.net/

Honestly, I use Excel. Appearance is basic, basic, basic! No frills here! Note that I am not using these for my main collection - I am trying to make up country collections of dupes. I was trying to place ease-of-use, availability, and my limited skill above professional appearance. If you make your cells very small horizontally, you can give each line of spaces different # of stamps and different spacing between stamps on each row (allows wider spacing of only 2 stamps per row, compared to narrower spacing for 5/6/7 stamps per row). I will be using 8-1/2 X 11 paper (nice, heavy, acid-free, but standard size). Don't know if I will leave them loose (grouped in a manila envelope) or use a 3 ring binder. Each page has a header ("GREAT BRITAIN") and each set has a sub-header ("1840" "Unwatermarked" "Imperforate"), plus each space has short identifying text ("1p Black"). I think you can import images if you want to get fancy --- too much work for what I want. I keep a 'master' page with standard (stamp) sized boxes, so they are consistent from page to page.

FWIW, although I am plowing ahead with my project, there are probably better software suites with which to do this. Also, FWIW, I considered Word and PowerPoint, and ruled them out fairly early on. I don't have any of the other S/W's you've listed.

Adobe LiveCycle Designer/AEM Forms Designer - The only development platform I could find that allows a data source to be tied to the layout. This means that you can publish album pages with catalog numbers for each stamp space based upon a user's own database (thereby avoiding any entanglements with catalog publishers who falsely claim copyright infringement). The resulting PDF page looks for the data source when it is opened and if found, automatically places the catalog number to each stamp space. Data source files are controlled by the user, they can use their own numbering system or use any catalog numbering system they desire.
In my opinion this is critical, I can not imagine investing hundreds of man hours in developing album pages without at least having external data handling capability available.
Don

Other - pen and ruler.

I use Microsoft Publisher for my thematic and Postal History pages.

Not sure how I missed Publisher as an option. I used to use it!

AlbumEasy

Apologies. It's early and the coffee hasn't taken hold.

Dale

Hello PostmasterGS,
I appreciate that you created this survey to meet a specific need, however, without compromising your results, the survey could have been far more useful to others if you had of also included dedicated album software amongst the choices.

The results could then have been especially helpful to anyone looking for alternatives when deciding on what software to evaluate when it comes to creating their own album pages.

On a more personal note, and I write this from a blatantly biased point of view, I would have been very interested in getting some idea of just how many people are using AlbumEasy. Currently, I have absolutely no idea - I couldn't tell whether it is 20 or 20,000.

Clive

I use LibreOffice Draw along with Steiner pages. It allows me to edit the pages and add illustrations of the stamps. It should also be able to create pages from scratch, though I have never done that.

Other: Adobe Illustrator

Apple Pages

AutoCAD

The two comments above express what I do. I use Powerpoint all the time for slide shows, I'm not sure how it works for a printed page layout, I've never tried that. From past work experience (unrelated to stamp album pages) I have used Adobe Pagemaker, and while I'm not thinking of any specific reasons right now I preferred it to Publisher. However, Adobe products aren't inexpensive, I already own a licensed edition of Microsoft Office 2013, and Publisher works well enough for me for designing a page or form (much better than using a word processor in my humble opinion).

Most of the time I am modifying Steiner pages and LibreOffice Draw works well for that since I can't open a pdf with Publisher. LibreOffice Draw would probable work well for designing from scratch, I've just never tried that and I am already familiar with using Publisher.

I've thought about developing an inventory program in Microsoft Access. Then I should also be able to generate album pages through Access' Report function, I think.

Simple - set the page size to the size paper you are using. Set guides for any internal borders that the page might have.

Boxes, text boxes, grouping, arrows, lines, alignment tools, etc. are all available in the menus.

You can insert pictures into the boxes and have online versions of your collection, or delete the pictures and print the blank page. Each slide is a page. Each file is a collection.

Every page in this collection - some for exhibiting (single and double-wide pages) and the pages printed on album page blanks were done in PowerPoint - http://www.cgpostal.com

Apple Pages.