Making your own album 11

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4      Module 2 : Rehearsing and deepening Mod. 1

4.1     Title page separate from album pages (2 A)

4.1.1     Preparing your album

Whether you collect on loose pages, in a preprinted album, or a stockbook, your album will always have a cover, possibly followed by a blank flyleaf.

A title page, can be a nearly blank page, with a signle title, a picture, a picture with a  single text line….

In this part, we will learn to make such a title page.

We start with a blank program page. In the example below, I added some blank lines, which have no effect on the result. It is only to make a visual devider while programming.
Copy the commands to your program page:

 

 

# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

# Standard settings for the album
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ALBUM_PAGES_SIZE (210.0 297.0)

# Page A4 format or (215.9 279.4 for US Letter)
ALBUM_PAGES_MARGINS (12.0 12.0 15.0 15.0)
# W/E/N/S margins
ALBUM_PAGES_BORDER (0.5 0.1 0.0 1.0)
#4 pm (in pt) border : thickness of line 1/ line 2 / line 3 / distance in-between
ALBUM_TITLE ("My New Album")
#title of my album
ALBUM_AUTHOR ("Johnny Collector")
#the author of the album
ALBUM_PAGES_SPACING (6.0 6.0)
#spacing settings
ALBUM_DEFINE_FONT (DJ "DejaVu Sans")
#standard font

We remember from Module 1A, that this code will not generate anything yet, as we haven’t added any page to our album.

# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

# Title page of the album.
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PAGE_START

Remark 1: the command : Album_Author will not appear on your page. (as it is not a text commad like Album_Title )
It is a kind of digital signature to your document.

Remark 2: If you do not want to have a border frame on your title page, you can ommit the command, or put the values on 0.
Once you start to make ‘pages’ you can add the command line again, to create the border for the rest of the album.
Now I have added it, to make it easier to navigate on the page.

Save as “Test design 5a”

4.1.2     A title page with one item

Often a title page is een nice picture, representing a country, a theme, a year, …

The command : Page_Background_Img, puts an image from your computer in the centre of the page.
It will be centered on both the horizontal as the vertical axes.
This command only has one fixed parameter,(location and name of the image + extension).
A second, optional parameter, can be added to scale the original image.
And a third, optional parameter existing out of two values, can both be added, or both be omitted. This pm allows deviations on the horizontal and/or vertical axis.  
In other words, does the image deviates from the middle of the page or not.

PAGE_BACKGROUND_IMG (image [scale] [hoffset voffset])

Pm ‘image’ : refers to the folder and name of the image you want to add:
(ex : stamps_images/flag_canada.png)

All types of images can be used, but the best result can be obtained by using .png – files (see later). For now we can stick to the most common JPG or JPEG images.

      Scale – parameter : optional

o   1 : 100 % or the images as it is

o   2 : 200 % double sized images (as long as it fits within the margins)

o   0.5 : 50% half size of the original

Hoffset – Voffset
o   H offset
    §  A positive number puts the pic towards the South (down)
    §  A negative number puts the picture to the North, (upwards)
o   V offset
    §  A positive number puts the pic towards the East (right)
    §  A negative number puts the picture to the West (left)
Always seen from the centre of the page

Now we will add a picture tot he title page, using the first (mandatory) pm.
Then we add a second, and finally a third (double) pm.
Click generate and PDF after eacht change, close the PDF afterwards before adding changes.

PAGE_BACKGROUND_IMG("stamp_images/building.png" 1.0 0.0 0.0)

normal image, scaled image and scaled + deviated image

With some skill, you can make the image small, and position it into one of the 4 corners.
The command can be repeated on every page, and become an indication of the main theme or sub-theme of your album.
Since it is a ‘background’ image, we can also draw text or even boxes on top of the image.

to be continued ... 

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next part : https://rainbowstampsandcoins.blogspot.com/2021/04/making-your-own-album-12.html