AlbumEasy - Getting Started

Albums are defined by a set of commands in an album definition file. This is a regular text file which is created by means of a text editor or word-processor. AlbumEasy processes these commands to generate an Album in PDF format for later viewing and printing.

Although it is possible to use almost any text editor such as the very basic Windows Notepad, it will be far more productive to use one of the many excellent text editors that are available free on the Web. A few examples are jEdit and Geany which are both cross platform, or the Windows only Programmer's Notepad. Alternatively a word-processor may be used in which case it is important to enure that the file is saved in text only format.

A PDF viewer such as the ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat is also necessary for viewing and printing the generated Albums. In most cases the user is likely to have this already installed on their system, If not it may be downloaded free of charge from http://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/

NOTE: When printing from Acrobat, please ensure that the "Shrink oversized pages to paper size", and "Expand small pages to paper size" options are not checked in the print dialogue box. Otherwise items on the page may be printed with the wrong dimensions.

CREATING A FIRST ALBUM

In order to create an Album using the provided sample file please follow these simple steps:
  1. Press the Open button to display the File Open dialogue box. Use this to navigate to the examples folder which should have been created when AlbumEasy was installed and then open the AlbumSample.txt file.
  2. After the AlbumSample.txt file has been loaded press the Generate button to create an album called AlbumSample.pdf that may now be viewed via Adobe Acrobat or a similar PDF viewer.

CREATING A CUSTOM ALBUM

  1. The easiest way of creating a new album is to copy and modify an existing text file such as the provided example: AlbumSample.txt. After copying the new file it should be given an appropriate name e.g. Canada.txt.
  2. The new text file is edited with a text editor using any of the commands listed in the Commands section of this help file to specify the album.
  3. After the file is saved it is opened with AlbumEasy which then generates the new album as a PDF file.

ADVANCED - USING FONTS

AlbumEasy provides a number of built-in fonts which are used for creating text. These built-in fonts contain the characters in the Latin 1 character set which should be sufficient for displaying text in most Western European languages. In addition to the built in fonts AlbumEasy is also able to display text using many of the fonts installed on a user's system. This may be purely for aesthetic purposes or when necessary to display international languages.
The examples folder contains additional sample files illustrating this usage: