All you need is:
This great program will let you hack together pages pretty quickly with minimal effort. I use is for most of my pages.
http://www.germanstamps.net/pmgssapg_scribus/
He has number of YouTube videos up showing you how to use his software to make your own pages.
It seems Scribus 1.4.7 was released in April
This is going to be the last release in the 1.4.x series. All further development is going into the 1.5.x branch to get it ready for stable release as 1.6.
I can’t wait for 1.6 to come out.
http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Download
So, we’re very big Doctor Who fans in my house. When Royal Mail released Doctor Who stamps in March of last year, I immediately ordered a set and went about creating some stamp pages.
I was originally going to include Stanley Gibbons catalog numbers on my pages, but my communications went south and the whole thing got delayed because of it.
So I removed the catalog numbers and redid the pages, and here they are!
The pages are designed for Doctor Who fans as well as stamp collectors, so some pages are pretty heavy on the descriptions.
And here are the files:
US Letter PDF: Doctor-Who
A4 PDF: Doctor-Who-A4
Scribus Files you can edit yourself: Scribus Files
And here is a screen shot of one of the pages:
So, I have recently begun work on an album of 21st Century US Stamps. One of the things that’s insanely useful about properly laid out album pages, is the use of catalog numbers to you identify what you have and what you need. You can design your own album pages and use catalog numbers, but distributing them to others can be a bit tricky.
From my personal experience, Scott will not give you a license to distribute their catalog numbers in album pages you make for others. So what’s a guy to do? USE STYLES!
Styles are a feature in Scribus that lets you set a certain font, size, color. spacing, justification, etc. and then apply those same settings to a text box. You can then set the same style to multiple text boxes. When you change the style, ALL the text boxes assigned to that style change also.
Here’s an example of a stamp with Scott catalog numbers on the bottom:
And here is a part of a page with 3 different Scott numbers:
So, as you can see, you could not give this page to other people. But, luckily I took the trouble to learn about Scribus style sheets and all the catalog numbers have the same style.
So, go to the menu up top and click on Edit and choose Styles:
You will then see a list of styles:
Choose the style for your Catalog numbers and click on Edit:
Click on the Character style tab. Go down to Colors and click on the arrow. Choose White off the list. Click on Apply and then choose Done.
Once that’s done, close the Style window and you’ll see all the catalog numbers are gone:
Now all you need to do is make a PDF file for people. Go to the File menu, choose Export and then choose PDF:
The PDF preflight checker will come up. Just choose to Ignore errors:
The next dialog will prompt you to save the PDF file.
Click on Save and you’ll have a PDF without Catalog numbers!
User PostmasterGS has taken his outstanding PMGS Stamp Album Page Generator and ported it to Scribus and OpenOffice!
I am so looking forward to trying this out!
See his post here!
I made this super quick and dirty video on how to line up stamp boxes on a page in Scribus for someone. Thought I would post it for the world to see.
Click on this link to watch the video:
So, I learned that the tool I use to crank out stamp pages, Scribus, is scriptable.
I decided to take advantage of this fact and write a script that can use some form of input (an XML file in my case) and use it to crank out a bunch of boxes on a page that have stamp images inside, a title over the top and a description on the bottom. You still need to move these boxes around and lay them out, but that’s pretty easy to do with the built in align and distribute tools. Getting everything lined up right for each individual stamp box was consuming a lot of my time.
So, I wrote about it on stampcommuinty.org and posted the script. It’s crude, but it works. Check out my post here, if you want to give it a try:
