Printing a catalog

Has anyone any thoughts about how one could make a printed copy of one's shop contents to use as a catalog?

I'm going to have a stand at an exhibition in London next month and from my experience last year there is no wifi/ internet access there.Was thinking about doing a paper printout of the shop pages, but the format you get if you try and print the page is less than wonderful. Also item titles are truncated .

Using a phone as a portable hotspot would be very expensive for me as I don't live in the UK and so would be on a roaming tariff - the only other alternative I can think of is downloading the shop pages with something like winhttrack and sticking the dump on a tablet .

So I'm thinking again about the paper catalog option - but how to get it looking nice ?

Tom

I'm fascinated by this idea, it sounds like it might take some screen grabbing finagling in a 3rd party program to get it to look right.

What kind of catalog were you thinking, can you share an example of someone else's?




If you do go this route let us know how successful it was. Maybe there is a way that we can have a formatting option for printing out your shop pages.

~Andrew

@teebee: are you on windows or apple?
I might have some tricks that'd help

By my calculations you have 1448 models in your shop. If you try to create an attractive catalogue using even a small image of each, it's going to be thick, and take a long time to make, regardless of how you do it.

I suggest that you make a list of all your product titles, sort them into a sensible set of groups (probably your shop sections would make sense), and then format those using either a word processor or desktop publisher. Chose a subset of the most attractive images and put one or two of those on each page. Maybe you want to put in urls to each item, or maybe you can just give the link to each section. If you're giving the prices in pounds they're going to vary each month, so that's an issue. If you report it you'll need to make a note somewhere about it changing. If you can group together items of about the same cost, you could do that, then include a phrase like "all scale 00x carrages are about £xx.".

To get the raw data, download your pricing markup CSV, which handily has the full product names. Then you'll need to monkey with it in a spreadsheet to get the data out - probably you can sort by is_public and delete all the private lines, then sort by material_name to get hold of a contigous list of one of each item. If you want to list things in several different materials, you'll have more to do.


I figure you want one or two copies of this catalogue to have on your stand, rather than to sell or give away. I think you're so invested that you will already have business cards to give to everyone you speak to or want one. So if you think the problem is that people need to know the url of the thing they want, write the short shapeways url next to each item and you can just copy it onto the back of the card for them.

I'm on windows

I know this is going to run to 60 or 100 pages, but I want to produce something that has an illustration of each thing I do and a title and a price. It would be nice to sort into sections, but not essential.

Plan is to put it on the stand in a binder for people to look through - I have cards with the URL of the shop on to give away so they can look at their leisure, but I only have physical examples of about 20% of what I do , I want some way to show people the rest.

Tom

I could use something like this for personal reference. I really like being able to easily flip between similar products and mark-up edits or other notes with a nice red pen. Printouts are getting really huge with things like the customization feature. An essential content print button would be a grand thing to have. Also just the printouts of the store or store sections would be greatly, greatly improved if the full model titles were displayed.

A few suggestions: It's a good idea to have a printed catalog, or a few different one with different group of models. First, I would save each pic (or the one you want for now) in a folder for reference, so that you always have a digital copy of the model pics to keep.

Then use those pics for layout in a page program with titles, info. And print the catalog pages for blinder is the easiest way, so you can always arrange them and update anytime. Or you can print the whole catalog with cover layout, logo and print in a local print shop.

You could also use the files for digital slideshow, put the layout pages online, website for customer to view. All you need is the pics files and a good layout page design with your info, logo, etc. Then you can always replace the model pics for update.

I am a graphic designer, that's what I would do. As for quick reference, I would save a screen shot of the shop with all the models at once. Then you can save it in your phone for quick reference too.

Hope this help.
Elsa

I sent you a PM. I have a few tricks up my sleeve where I might be able to help. If you've got MS-word, you can probably use the document I sent you to get your catalog printed.

The big decision here is what format do you want the catalog to look like? The other obstacle is that my tools right now only see USD.. if you want some other currency in your catalog, I'll have to work a bit harder. <grin>

One suggestion is that if you have an iPad or other tablet device, you could store the images on the tablet and then allow customers to browse thru your catalog interactively.

I have been deep in contemplation lately on how to present an (electronic) catalog that automatically flips from one page to the next based on a timer, but would also allow a user to click an image to go to the shop to buy it. The trouble is.. I'm wanting to keep it very very simple.. no databases, etc. ... so I'm not sure what to build yet.

Probably doable with pdf (I'd try to generate a LaTeX document from the shop data and use the Beamer style or similar for pdf generation, but it is probably possible to wrestle msword into doing similar things)

A printed catalogue would be something very nice indeed
We have at least noticed that many of our customers like the old fashioned style of catalogues. Also it helps people finding products. Webshops are always a bit clumpsy to them (or probably everybody).
But printing catalogues a bit out of our league. Therefore we made a PDF: http://railnscale.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/railnscale-cat alogue-20150927.pdf
To be honest, it took quite some time to create this book. But I guess it will be appreciated.



Happy reading,
Maurice
RAILNSCALE

It would be cool if SW will add function of generate multi-page PDF-version of whole shop or single shop section.

Maurice, your catalog looks very professional. Good stuff there. However, with Tom's 4500+ products, that is going to be a very large book to print off. If he uses your 4-items per page layout, he'd have to be carrying around over 1000 pages. But, at least it'd be less pages than the US Heathcare Bill.<grin>

I don't think it's quite that bad : 30 pages of 48 each, plus 8 on the last page : 1448 items.
Unless... there are others somewhere I didn't think to look?

Still a massive effort to form up and print, though.

Anyway, Tebee, I think you probably only need one big image for each type of thing - i.e. not one for everything in every scale.
But you should state the scale of the item in each picture. You could then rotate through each scale used for the image in each group.
That cuts down the work somewhat. Perhaps... a few hundred? (It depends how close you are to everything in every scale as well as how many distinct scales you have.)
BUT. I also think the picture should be higher resolution than the small shop index display images. I'm not sure low-res images would gain you anything.
For items you've already photographed, I'd use that image almost every time - hopefully you still have the original in a higher res. Then backfill with images of all the other things, 625x465 resolution gleaned from the item pages if necessary.

I guess you might be able to (or get someone to) write and use a script to scrape the web-pages and extract an image for each item in your shop. Because it would be a big job otherwise.

I think I have about 1,500 public items these days. I'm thinking of printing 4 items across the page and 5 down, so 20 items per page.

That means I'll have about 75 pages - a lot, but doable - I have a printer with a continuous ink system so it won't cost a fortune.

I know I duplicate some items in different scales, but often they are not the same - the time taken to sort out which are real duplicates or different variant would be far too much.

Tom

Good idea!

Have you thought about going through a photo book site like Snapfish? That might be the cheapest & fastest way to go if you only need one catalog printed. Could get a bit tricky with adding descriptions and pricing though.

Hey railNscale the catalog you made looks beautiful!

I'm very interested in this idea. If Shapeways were to make a catalog, what categories of models and shops do you think should be included?

What shops would want to be represented in a specific category?

What languages should it be available in?

I wanted to markup some things on store products on a piece of paper; since I like doing thing old school. Product names, markups, the new categorization and facet stuff mostly. It's just basic things that can be easily looked at to see if something is way out of balance or in error including default images and render positions. Anyway I tried printing a store page from Chrome and it just doesn't seem to want to print the last 10 or so products. The store sections info and store header showed up on the first page and the actual products (not all of them) show up on the rest of the pages with some products being sliced in half at the page breaks. Landscape was actually worse than portrait as I recall. Very painful.

Anyway, I copied a page view or 4 columns and 3 rows of products one at a time into Paint and then printed it out (in landscape). That resulted in 4 pages of paper for every page of store, and a total of 16 pieces of paper. Anyone have any ideas for an easier way to do this in the future? Maybe a different browser or interface program that can strip things out and present them better? An alternative might be to get a print friendly store view option on the web page.

Hi,

Today we launched our new catalog: https://railnscale.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/railnscale-catalogue-21112016.pdf

As we've been updating about all facets we also improved our shop here at Shapeways: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/rail-n-scale
Note that we've included some tutorials in German and French too.

We noticed that an alarming amount of potential customers needed some extra explanation about how to order products at Shapeways. That's we we've made 2 video's:

English/German video:
French/Dutch video:

Kind regards,
Maurice
https://railnscale.com/

Has anyone else thought about this recently? It's 4 years into the future so there might be a better way.

All I can think of doing (simply) is screen grabbing a product page and plopping it into a powerpoint. A problem is that I need to zoom out the browser to 50% which makes the font smaller and much of it less legible. If I could figure out a way to flip the page on its side before grabbing that should improve the font appearance. I'm on an old Windows laptop so after grabbing and cropping I get about 660 vertical pixels and doubling that would certainly help. Maybe doing a similar thing on an ipad would improve resolution? Do I need a new computer? Any other ideas?