DPS Page Size and Layout

Fran Adams

As is often said, but rarely practiced, “Planning is Everything.” In developing a DPS, that quote is an invaluable piece of advice. If suggestions in the preceding articles have borne fruit, you now have a reasonable subject, goal and outline. Our planning process can continue with some basic formatting concepts.

By incorporating this basic set of formatting rules, designed to complement each other from the beginning, your study is much less likely to end up as a non-functional collection of electrons.

Please note: Rather than experimenting and possibly coming to the same conclusions as outlined hereafter, the following criteria are suggested as a starting point for your new DPS. There’s no requirement to follow every detail strictly, or even at all, but points in this portion of our ‘DPS Cookbook’ may save you time in getting your study up and running quicker.

Rules of Engagement

We’ll begin with a guiding principle for our DPS:

• The DPS should be ‘viewed comfortably’ on computer screens (this is what digital is all about).

So, how do our ‘formatting rules’ ensure our DPS is viewed comfortably and available to most everyone regardless of computing platform?

To realize comfortable viewing, our DPS must have consistent presentation.

Consistency quickly provides viewers a feeling of ‘familiarity’ and the document’s ‘ease of use’ factor increases. To develop consistency, we’ll define a common layout, text and graphic styles for headers, paragraphs, etc. for use throughout the study.

Page size and viewing area.

Physical Size

Beginning with a physical format often helps me to ‘see’ what I’m doing. To help you ‘see’ what you’re doing, take a standard sheet of writing paper and turn it horizontal so it’s 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches high.

In general, computer screens are capable of displaying horizontal documents better than vertical documents. We’ll take advantage of that real estate and develop our ‘Formatting Guide’ with this in mind as it’s also a common format for PowerPoint presentations.

I’m going to get a slight bit ‘techie’ here, so please don’t let your eyes glaze over immediately.

Computer screens use a display measurement known as pixels per inch (ppi). You may have also heard the term ‘dots per inch’ (dpi) which is a printing measurement. Although not precise, let’s simplify things and use these terms interchangeably.

Windows computer screens display a standard of 96 dpi and naturally, the larger the screen, the more dots are displayed. To accommodate most everyone’s computer monitor we’ll use a presentation size of 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high. 1024 pixels wide is approximately 10.6 inches wide and 768 pixels is 8 inches high. (Macintosh screens display at 72 dpi. The 1024 x 768 screen equals approximately 14.2 inches wide by 10.6 inches high.)

Page and Screen Size

Thinking in terms of that writing paper we used previously, we see we’re dealing with a screen display roughly the same size as our sheet of writing paper turned sideways – electronically!

Super. Now that we can visualize the screen area we have to work with, we can even sketch some things out by hand or make notes to remind us of what belongs on which page.

Page Margins?

To keep it simple as well as getting the most space out of our computer screen real estate or 1024×768 pixels, we’re not going to use fancy colored or graphic page outlines in our study. They can reduce the available area quite a bit and we need that area for our overall page.

The page margin will be a minimum of 0.5 inches on all sides, ensuring headers and footers are within the main content area. This gives us a working area of roughly 9.5 inches wide and 7 inches high.

Who Holds Copyright?

Albert W. Starkweather, Philatelic Communicator

Author’s note: This is intended as an overview to this area and does not constitute legal advice. Writers and editors with specific questions about fair use and copyright should seek legal advice.

In the case of works for hire, the employer and not the employee is considered to be the author if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. A work for hire is one prepared by an employee within the scope of employment or one specially ordered or commissioned.

The authors of a joint work are co-owners of the copyright in the work, unless there is an agreement to the contrary. Copyright in each separate contribution to a periodical or other collective work is distinct from copyright in the collective work as a whole and vests initially with the author of the contribution.

Several types of material are not eligible for copyright protection, including those that have not been fixed in a tangible form of expression; titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents; ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration; and works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship, such as a standard calendar.

Publication no longer is the key to obtaining federal copyright as it was under the Copyright Act of 1909. However, publication remains important to copyright owners for several reasons, including:

• Works published in the United States are subject to mandatory deposit with the Library of Congress.
• Publication of a work can affect the limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner.
• The year of publication may determine the duration of copyright protection for anonymous and pseudonymous works.

The use of the copyright notice is the responsibility of the copyright owner and does not require advance permission from, or registration with, the U.S. Copyright Office (www.copyright.gov). The notice for visually perceptible copies should contain three elements:

• The symbol ©, or the word Copyright, or the abbreviation Copr., followed by:
• The year of first publication of the work. The year date may be omitted where a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work, with accompanying textual matter, if any, is reproduced in or on greeting cards, postcards, stationery, jewelry, dolls, toys, or any useful article.
• The name of the owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner.

The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U.S. law, although it is often beneficial. (Also see article on trademarks.)

Do DPS Your Way

Fran Adams

Perspective is your unique spin on your little piece of the wide, wide world of philately. It’s how you arrange your material and knowledge into the final presentation using a fresh angle only you can create. It’s the realization of the dream, so stay as true to the dream as possible and you’ll be satisfied with the result.

If you’re doing this for the judges, and these days, digital philatelic studies are gaining a standing of their own, well, maybe you pay attention to the rules of philatelic literature judging found on the APS web site stamps.org/directories/dir_lit/litjudging.pdf. Additional resources for a DPS are the Mega-Event Digital Philatelic Study rules www.asdaonline.com/index.php?id=65 and various article in ‘The Philatelic Communicator‘, journal of the Writer’s Unit 30 www.wu30.org of the APS.

For the most part however, this is a very personal and creative exercise. Now is your chance. Organize your study in your fashion and get things done right!!

Effort

A project will absorb as many hours as you’re willing to put into it. If you’re like me, time gets away from you and before you know it – geez is it time for dinner already? I now limit my sittings at the computer screen in terms of minutes and my eyes thank me for it. (I cheat a little as I don’t limit the number of times I can sit there each day.) There are no rules that say I have to be on the computer every day, so I can build the study as suits me time-wise.

That said, you’ll likely put a reasonable amount of time into building your new study. At first it may appear to be an unending task and essentially, it could be, depending on what you wish to achieve – study or full blown philatelic reference. As I said earlier in Dream, Questions and Goal, choose your subject carefully so a useful result is possible. Any basic study can always be expanded by adding new discoveries to its content and depth to the support information making it ever more comprehensive.

Philatelic items, background text and support graphic.

Payoff

The real payoff is in the organization of your data. You’ll gain immediate access to the information, without looking through a bookshelf, and as you continue adding, the smaller bits of data won’t get lost. The effort will shine most brightly when you perform a search for a key word and let the document do the work for you.

A second and perhaps more personally beneficial payday occurs when someone you don’t know sees your study and contacts you with information you’ve either been unsuccessful in finding or didn’t know about. Sharing information is now possible with less effort than ever before. Digital documents are very portable and quite easily transmitted anywhere in the world via a quick e-mail message or posting to a web site.

How about sharing your information source with your friends, local club, specialty society or even at a national convention as a public presentation? Helping others expand their knowledge is also an honorable goal and perhaps a kindred heart may be found to boot.

The latest development on the DPS front is promotion of the medium by the Mega-Show in New York. Participating in a competition may be an option for your newly minted digital philatelic study.

As you’ve read this far, you’ve completed a portion of the planning process discussed above, so grab that notebook and start writing down those ideas.