Generating Album Pages with Visio (1)
Ken Horner, Compulatelist
Reading an article by Martin Richardson got me thinking about my own efforts in creating album pages to display my collections. For some reason, I like having my stamps presented in interesting contexts as opposed to just using the tried and true stock book method. I guess it goes back to my using early Harris and White Ace albums when I was just getting started over 40 years ago.
I’ve tried a couple of the earlier page generation tools and ultimately settled on something I was more familiar with given my college summer job as a draftsman. I used Autodesk’s Autocad a decade back, but its current cost is out of line with hobbyist use. I’ve used QuarkXPress and Adobe Pagemaker for document production, and even gave Microsoft’s PowerPoint a go, but all came up short: too expensive, too hard to use, not enough typography support, etc.
I finally have settled on Microsoft’s Visio — although admittedly still not a cheap answer. An OEM copy of the not-the-latest version is available for less than $200. As Martin pointed out in his article, the graphical interface is essential; you have to see what you are going to get before you waste a print cycle. That’s what Visio gives me.
Sample Album Page Made with Visio.
After some trial and error, I’ve developed an overall approach that uses a general design style, templates, and copying pages to make life simpler. I started off by duplicating the simple format of a Scott US album to allow me to hold items that go back earlier than Scott supplies pages for. That’s worked out fine once I figured out how to deal with pages that weren’t 8 1/2″ x 11″. I’m working on my third album concept now to hold my Palestine Mandate collection.
This is an image of a standard page which is made up of two border elements, a collection title, page heading and text comments with stamp outlines and an explanatory graphic. The fonts and line colors and weights are all copied from one page to another to keep things looking alike.
Page copying may be the only hang up Visio has, in that selecting all page elements and pasting them onto a new page puts them in a “centered” position rather than at their original locations. But I’ve gotten used to doing a “select all” and then dragging them back to a known origin point. On the 10.6″ x 11.7″ size Lighthouse pages that I use, I get lots of room for stamps and images, but it does require me to keep a large format printer handy. I use an HP 9650 printer which easily handles the sheet size. I tell the printer it’s a B4 sheet size, and then adjust the Visio page margins to cope.
Sample Title Page with Images.
I also like Visio for its ability to do some more complex pages and not get into the out-of-capacity problems I’ve seen with anything except high end programs. A cover page example has several high density graphics embedded. 
(continuation of this article Generating Album Pages with Visio Part 2)
