Digital Philatelic Workshop

Janet Klug, WE Think

Body pages are just as easy to create as title pages using Publisher and the techniques we have just described in the article MS Publisher and Title Pages.

First you need to add a few pages. Use the “Insert” feature on the tool bar. A pretty self-explanatory drop down menu appears. Add the number of pages behind the current page.

How ever many pages you add will appear orange tabs near the bottom of the screen. This allows you to move from one page to the next by just clicking on the page tab.

Inserting New Pages

Page two will automatically appear on the screen when you click “OK.”. At this point it will blank. You then begin to add subheadings, captions, and other text and illustrations. Each of these things will go in either a text box or a “picture” box.

Placing the boxes exactly where you want them is made incredibly easy. Notice on the page that there is a horizontal ruler at the top of the work area, and a vertical ruler along the left side of the work area. Your cursor will create a line on each ruler that helps you place text and pictures exactly.

Just keep adding stuff until you get the page the way you want it to look. This finished page shows a pretty complicated layout of stamps, covers, text and a scan showing a die variety.

At the top of the page in the left corner I placed a tw-oline subheading. This was reflected in the plan of the exhibit that appeared on the title page. Below that is a boxed notation in red that highlights an important feature of what is being shown on this page… that the stamp is the first printing of multiple printings that will be exhibited.

Finished Page from Exhibit.

Directly below that is a scan of what the first die looks like, enlarged from the stamp so the viewer can easily see it, and then text below that describes in words what you are looking at.

Then come the stamps, from left to right. First, is actually the reverse of the stamp, so that the viewer can see the aniline ink bleeding to the back of the stamp.

Then there is a corner block, shown to illustrate the line perforations, and finally on the right is a SPECIMEN overprint.

Two covers showing first printing stamps round out this page. Each item has its own text that went into a text box.

Microsoft Publisher has many more features too numerous to mention for this article. I suggest you try it yourself. The current version of Publisher runs on Windows XP or Vista. It requires a 500 megahertz (MHz) processor or higher, 256 megabytes (MB) RAM (random access memory) or higher, 1.5 gigabytes on your hard disk, a CD-ROM or DVD drive to load the software, and a video display of 1024 X 768 or higher resolution.

Download a trial version of Publisher or take an online test drive on their website. The purchase price from Microsoft is $170, but you can probably find it cheaper elsewhere. I’ve tried lots of different software to make my exhibits. Publisher works best for me.

Don Chafetz, Israel Philatelist

Should I Twitter? Does this picture belong on Facebook? Does this video belong on YouTube? What is Cloud computing?

The computer world has many new technology options which I am just now trying to understand. Since my children and granddaughters are not nearby to explain and show me how to use this new technology, I am struggling.

Besides learning the mechanisms of each new application, my mind is always trying to figure out how philately can use the technology to spread the word. I have taken my first steps due to the encouragement of my daughter, Gwyn, and am now on Facebook.

No, I have not posted an extensive profile. Instead, I use the site as a way to share pictures with my family and a few friends. For philatelists, I can visualize the site as a tool to exchange images of stamps or covers that might be of interest. The advantage of using Facebook is that the images are on the web and you can invite fellow collectors anywhere in the world to view them. There is no need to send the images to everyone. Also, you can add comments about the images and again everyone can view the comments and comment on the comments!

YouTube is a good site for posting videos that anyone can see. I have not formally arrived at the point where I have a video to post, but I have made a very crude one. I took some still images of one of my side collections, The Morris Canal, and placed them in Apple’s iMovie program. While crude, I was able to create and play the movie, but with no audio track.

Actually, there was another effort a friend, Fran Adams, and I made that was all audio, but had no video! It could have been posted to YouTube, but with no video it would not have been well received. The audio recording was created during the 2009 SANDICAL stamp exhibition in San Diego. I did an audio description of a Judacia exhibit that was in the show while Fran handled the audio and editing portion.

The bottom line is that with very simple and inexpensive technology philately has the means to show and demonstrate the beauty and joy of our hobby.

Twitter registration screen

While President Obama is a Twitterer, I am not. I have not found a need to be in continuous contact with anyone, letting them know my every move. But, I can see where it can come in handy when you are at a stamp show with a friend. For instance, as you and your friend are visiting dealer booths and doing your never ending search for the right items, I can visualize you Tweeting your results back and forth. In fact, you might have found some elusive items that he/she has been searching for and you can hurriedly inform him of its location.

As far as cloud computing is concerned, I am not exactly sure how it will work and the advantages it offers now to philately.

Nevertheless, as I understand it, you basically keep all your information on an internet computer (server) thus eliminating the need for your information on your home computer. I assume the advantage is that whatever records, images, etc. you have on your home computer would be available to you literally anywhere in the world via the internet and the cloud. At this point I am not sure about the value of the technology when you can use an iPod Touch to do the same thing now.

The main point of this discussion is that new technology and computer programs are becoming common place and we in philately need to be aware of them and try to harness their capability and power. “Why?” you might ask. Well for one thing they can make our philatelic life easier and more fun by helping us maintain our inventories, create a visual record of our collections and most importantly facilitate communication with other collections.

But for me, the most important long term reason is that these tools are really marketing tools that we must use to spread the word about our hobby. A video on philately posted on YouTube or pictures posted on Facebook can be seen by millions of potential collectors. Of course, both of these methods would have links to our web sites and information about our societies.

Remember, new members are the life blood of any growing society. It is now time to more fully embrace the new technology and turn it to our advantage.

Fran Adams

Having all the necessary files present is important when your digital philatelic study must be portable. Nothing is worse than getting to a show in a strange city — with dealers that have your gems — and having forgotten a file that makes the study work. Submitting your study to be evaluated in a competition and having files missing is a close second.

Keeping all your files together in an organized fashion will allay most of your fears that something is not available when needed.

Ensuring everything is in the same place can be relatively easy by using one main folder for all files used in the study. This main folder may also contain subfolders. As illustrated in Figure 1, the Piltdown_Study folder contains subfolders for documents (docs), images (pics), references, and varieties. Organizing your files by either file type or subject is perfectly acceptable.

When using a series of folders and/or files, you may wish to associate the file and folder names to each other to appropriately identify their content. Graphics or image scans might be in a folder named pics for instance. Within the pics folder, a file might be named pic_stamp_variety_1.jpg. Use file names that make sense to you, but also are not something other viewers will not understand easily.

Fig. 1 - Folder and File Organization

We all modify our files occasionally and/or update them with the latest information.

In doing so, we often retain older versions or even versions with or without certain content. To help keep these versions straight, it’s useful to modify the file name slightly to indicate it is a version. This is usually done with a sequence number or letter. Using the example above, the modified version might be pic_stamp_variety_1a.jpg and a subsequent version would be pic_stamp_variety_1b.jpg. 

At a higher level, the hardware media the study is stored on should also have a name. When a Compact Disc (CD) is inserted into a computer’s drive, the CD’s name appears under the icon and again, that name should also be directly associated with your study’s subject.

Bottom line — name everything and insist the names are descriptive enough that your non-collecting spouse can identify the file or folder content from the name.

Does it take a little thought and time to do this? Yes, but you’ll be happy you did when you come back to do an update a year from now.

Omar Rodriguez, APS E-Xpress

In the last week 3 stamp collectors have added new short stamp related videos in YouTube. Below the links. Take a look and get inspired.

1. Fan Mail by Tom Richards
2. Where is my Teddy, by Janet Klug
3. Juarez, Maximilian and the Giadalajara Provisionals by Omar Rodriguez

When are you finishing  yours?

Mine took about 12 hours from beginning to end. But it is much longer than it should be…

Please let me know when yours is uploaded in YouTube so that the link can be posted in the APS website

Cheers, Omar

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