Beginning postmark album pages
Mar 13, 2023 0:31:56 GMT
Philatarium, classicalstamps, and 14 more like this
Post by eggdog on Mar 13, 2023 0:31:56 GMT
Here's the first experimental try. Troms og Finnmark, the northernmost county in Norway (not counting Svalbard Island), is easy to practice on because it has ten municipalities and not a whole lot of people - though more than I would have thought.
This will face a page that, so far, looks like this.
Boy, isn't that impressive? OK, uh, yeah. OK. Moving right along...the map outline itself is from a lovely Web site called MapChart, which lets you download .jpg maps that you can customize. You start off with a big map of Europe, or Africa, or whichever continent you want, and then you go through a few steps to "isolate" the particular country you want, add a few effects if you desire, and save and download it. It's free, though for $40 a year you get some nice functions such as saving maps and color charts, etc.
I downloaded a Norway map that MapChart had divided into counties. No roads, no names of anything, no cities. Just borders. I brought the map into Paint Shop Pro and chopped it into eleven pieces of roughly the same size (Viken County, which surrounds Oslo, took up two pieces) and will be filling them in one by one. Even after I cut them up, the eleven pieces were each about the size of Trondheim and I had to shrink them by about 90% to even begin to make them printable in size.
Quadrille paper that will fit in a laser printer (or is even made to go through a laser printer) is surprisingly hard to find. So I made a blank one-page spreadsheet in LibreOffice Calc - rows and columns both 0.18" - and put dotted lines for the borders, and then put a 1 in the upper left and bottom right corners (and changed the font color to pale yellow) so that LibO's print function would think it's a real spreadsheet and would actually print it. I exported that to a .png and can use it as the bottom layer in Paint Shop Pro, which kindly let me put Troms og Finnmark right on top of the quadrille. (I put the opacity of the map layer at 50%, and I see that the quadrilles show through the coloured area more than they do through the blank.) I can eyeball a road map and situate the towns accurately enough for my purposes on the quadrille grids.
I'm lousy at graphics, so the dot that represents Vardø is actually a period. Tromsø covers a couple of islands and some of the mainland, so I didn't even try to put a dot there. Tromsø has about 75,000 residents, which is probably equal to the rest of the county combined. (Vardø has slightly under 3,000. The fact that I have an 80-year-old postmark from there is testimony to the happiness to be found buying used and leftover collections.)
This will face a page that, so far, looks like this.
Boy, isn't that impressive? OK, uh, yeah. OK. Moving right along...the map outline itself is from a lovely Web site called MapChart, which lets you download .jpg maps that you can customize. You start off with a big map of Europe, or Africa, or whichever continent you want, and then you go through a few steps to "isolate" the particular country you want, add a few effects if you desire, and save and download it. It's free, though for $40 a year you get some nice functions such as saving maps and color charts, etc.
I downloaded a Norway map that MapChart had divided into counties. No roads, no names of anything, no cities. Just borders. I brought the map into Paint Shop Pro and chopped it into eleven pieces of roughly the same size (Viken County, which surrounds Oslo, took up two pieces) and will be filling them in one by one. Even after I cut them up, the eleven pieces were each about the size of Trondheim and I had to shrink them by about 90% to even begin to make them printable in size.
Quadrille paper that will fit in a laser printer (or is even made to go through a laser printer) is surprisingly hard to find. So I made a blank one-page spreadsheet in LibreOffice Calc - rows and columns both 0.18" - and put dotted lines for the borders, and then put a 1 in the upper left and bottom right corners (and changed the font color to pale yellow) so that LibO's print function would think it's a real spreadsheet and would actually print it. I exported that to a .png and can use it as the bottom layer in Paint Shop Pro, which kindly let me put Troms og Finnmark right on top of the quadrille. (I put the opacity of the map layer at 50%, and I see that the quadrilles show through the coloured area more than they do through the blank.) I can eyeball a road map and situate the towns accurately enough for my purposes on the quadrille grids.
I'm lousy at graphics, so the dot that represents Vardø is actually a period. Tromsø covers a couple of islands and some of the mainland, so I didn't even try to put a dot there. Tromsø has about 75,000 residents, which is probably equal to the rest of the county combined. (Vardø has slightly under 3,000. The fact that I have an 80-year-old postmark from there is testimony to the happiness to be found buying used and leftover collections.)
