Stamp Album

by D N Baron

Stamp Album was written to take the tedium out of drawing stamp album pages. It lets you catalogue your stamps using a series of simple text files, and then automatically produces elegant album pages in Draw file format.

Using Stamp Album
Use the RISC User disc menu system, or double-click on the !StampAlbm icon, to load the program.

To produce album pages in Draw file format, simply drag a stamp album formatted text file (the details of which are provided below) onto Stamp Album's icon bar icon. A standard RISC OS save dialogue box will then appear, allowing you to save the pages.

Stamp Album text file format
This section details the format needed to make your own Stamp Album text files, using !Edit or any other text editor. The best way to learn the format, however, is probably to examine the sample files provided.

* The country to appear as header on each page must be on the first line of the file.

* For each set of stamps there are seven fields separated by a Tab character (ASCII 09).

* The records for each set are separated by a new line, ie by pressing the Return key.

*The headings for each field in the record of a set are (all on one line):
Year	No	Hor	Vert	Set Description	Stamp Descriptions	SG

Year: This is treated as a string, and could actually be anything. It will be the first part of the heading to the set. Usually something like 1970 or 12.8.70

No: This is the number of stamps in the set or part set (it is more convenient sometimes to divide a set into two parts: one for the number of horizontal stamps, the other for the vertical stamps). If number in set is 0, or a blank string, then no action will be taken.

Hor: This is the horizontal width of the stamp in mm. Most catalogues have illustrations at  size. I measured the width of the illustration in mm, added a third, and the added a further 4 mm to take care of the stamp border which is invisible in the illustration; i.e. if the width of the illustration was 21mm, you would type 32 (21 + 7 + 4).

Vert: This is the vertical height of the stamp (same rules for measurement as above).

Set Description: This text appears above the set, e.g. Centenary of Archeological Museum

If the title for a set is blank, then the set appears 0.25 cm below the last set (instead of 1cm). This is useful between two part sets as two headings may cause confusion.

Stamp Descriptions: All the stamps in the set or part set are separated by commas. Unfortunately, this has the side-effect of preventing usage of commas in the descriptions.

The text typed here is printed within the borders allocated to the stamp and the text is centred. To force a new line, use the backslash character \. Other information, like perforations, errors, flaws etc., can be added using the \ as aseparator.

SG: This is for the catalogue numbers of the stamps. Most of the time this is straightforward if the stamps are numbered sequentially, just the first and last number with a COMMA separater. For example, 123,127 will number 5 stamps from 123 to 127.

However, if the stamps are out of sequence (as they sometimes are in simplified catalogues), or have other characters like 131a, 131b, O24 etc then EVERY stamp must have a corresponding number typed.

Other hints
* Extra blank lines must not be present at the end of a text file.

* Lines can be temporarily ignored or comments added by preceding the line with the | character (appears as a broken line above the backslash \ character on the keyboard).

Copyright  RISC User magazine 1998
