Most Comprehensive Denmark Printed Album?

The last post about albums for Danish stamps was quite some time ago. Perhaps it's of interest that in the meantime there are now two digital album texts created by myself (Alexander), covering the years 1851 to 2023, available for download at thestampweb (see link above).

Collectors of Danish Christmas seals will now also find an album there, available for the years 1904 to 1990.

Timm said, "Steiner pages are the best bang for the buck . . . When I did the switch I was shocked when I found Steiner was more complete than Scott, Davo etc."

I imagine for a lot of collectors the completeness of Steiner pages is appealing, but the look of Steiner pages is not. That is likely a major reason people purchases Scott pages or Davo or Lighthouse or others. Those "pre-printed" album pages just look better because they are more sophisticated, use a nicer font, nicer border, and so on. That's what kept me from using Steiner pages. I actually printed out Steiner pages for one or two entire countries on 55# card stock. I intended to use them, but the more I looked at them, the less happy I was. The small 8.5 x 11" page size was just too small and too crowded on that size page to display my stamps properly. The Steiner type font was much too stark looking for my taste. And the straight line border was not very elegant. People complain sometimes about Steiner's layouts being too crowded, but that was not an issue for me. His layouts are nearly always perfectly good looking and rarely crowded, but these other things were not appealing to me.

So what to do? I tried printing my Steiner page layouts on Scott Specialty blank paper with the Scott Specialty border. The result was excellent. They clearly looked like Scott pages which I've always liked. I also printed a few albums on Davo blank paper but later abandoned those just as I had abandoned the earlier pages because they would require too many binders -- up to seven or eight binders for some countries.

I know most people, looking to keep costs as low as possible, print on basic "printer size" paper and put the resulting pages in inexpensive three-ring binders. That's fine, but I found the look of those albums decidedly "discount" and unappealing for displaying nicer (and sometimes expensive) stamps. I put my Steiner-on-Scott blank pages into Scott binders and the look is excellent.

And there's one even better trick you can use. Steiner pages are in PDF format which you cannot edit -- so you'd think you're stuck with his fonts and layouts "as is." Not true. With just a few clicks, it's also possible to run Steiner page files through an online "PDF to Word" convertor (I currently like "PDF Candy"). The resulting Word files can be edited. I sometimes move stamp boxes or delete them entirely when I don't want certain stamps. Even better, I change the fonts to ones I like more. Once the page file is saved in Word, just chose "Select All" and choose a different font. Then I go back page by page and change the title font to another font I like much better. It doesn't take too long, and the resulting pages with Steiner layouts are far more elegant looking.

So you can use inexpensive Steiner page layouts but you do not have to be stuck with small-sized pages or Steiner's overly stark fonts.

The reasoning seems paradoxical - specialists opting for appearance rather than content. I use Steiner and create pages when needed to add spaces but I have experimented with tweaking the appearance.

Steiner page with modified font.

When I tried out PDF-to-Word converters, I found that the quality of the results varied quite a bit. Sometimes the thickness of the borders around the stamp boxes wasn't reproduced accurately, and sometimes the spacing between the boxes was off.

Still, if you manage to find a really good converter, this approach can certainly serve you well. The fundamental issue, however, remains: using standard office programs makes it rather cumbersome to adapt album page layouts to your own needs.

With Steiner pages, this applies not only to page size, but also to corrections of certain incorrect box dimensions and even to a reworking of the overall system in regard to semi-postals — a term that, outside of Scott, is used only rarely (though Steiner is, of course, primarily designed for U.S. collectors anyway).

LibreOffice Draw will faithfully convert PDFs to Draw and then you can modify. The issue with likely with Word conversion is that the concept of page composition is based upon paragraphs of text with other elements floating in relation. If it is difficult to create natively in Word you could not likely convert something to a non-Word layout.