They are available to print on A4 or US Letter size paper in Personal and Pocket Filofax Sizes.
ISO Paper Size.
- Filofax 1987 Personal
- Filofax Pocket 6-ring 1987-style 31 line
- Filofax Pocket 6-ring 1987-style
- Filofax PocketA 4-ring 1987-style
- Filofax PocketA 6-ring 1987-style
US Letter Size.
- Filofax 1987 Personal
- Filofax Pocket 6-ring 1987-style 31 line
- Filofax Pocket 6-ring 1987-style
- Filofax PocketA 4-ring 1987-style
- Filofax PocketA 6-ring 1987-style
Please note that these files contain around about 180 different insert designs, some are single, double or triple fold. There are also some quad fold inserts to be printed on A3/Tabloid paper for the required width.
As you will see when you open any of the files the first ones look quite 'ordinary' and the more interesting ones are much further down in the files, this is because of the way the original designs were numbered.
These inserts are also linked from this page.
There will occasionally be updates to the files.
Any issues with any of the above links please email steve at philofaxy dot com
Oh wow, I can't wait to check these out!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Steve!
ReplyDeleteGreat assets to have available- thanks Kevin.
ReplyDeleteRacks in stationers used to be full of these. They soon started to look a bit tatty as people thumbed through looking for the leaves they needed. I can remember buying the Windsurfing Record pack in the mid-1980s. Not sure my back would be up to it now!
ReplyDeleteA bit of an explanation may be in order.
ReplyDeleteLike many, I was fascinated by the little thumbnails of inserts in the 1984 catalogue. But those inserts were long gone. Now, for many reasons, I had a history, from 2012 onwards, of creating ring-based manual inserts, written automatically in PostScript, using a set of bespoke tools I had developed to do so ("what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career..."). This made creating table-based inserts rather easy, using definition files written using a simple formatting code of my own devising.
Whilst recovering from covid, I decided to occupy myself by recreating the Freeform Management notes & inserts. These were launched in 1987, with a newish, consistent style or 'design rules', so my inserts mostly copy these rules.
I then went on to re-create the inserts in the 1984 catalogue, which have a mixture of styles, but I decided to update them all the the '1987 style', with a border, and a title bar. I have gradually acquired images of real inserts, from various sources, including ebay sales, so I now have an almost complete set of '1987 style' inserts, with a notional copyright date of 1987.
Having created the Personal inserts, I turned to creating them all in my own 'PocketA' size; 120.65mm tall, as per Pocket, but with an ISO A-series 1:sqrt(2) aspect ratio. This is a page size I developed for my ring-bound manuals, as they were composed to A4, and thus easy to shrink to my 'PocketA', or 'A6.6' page size. As I use a first generation, 4-ring Pocket binder, I created the 4-ring PocketA versions first. These echo the introduction date of the 4-ring Pocket, so have a notional copyright date of 1989.
Since I also have 6-ring Pocket binders, I created a version of my PocketA size, in 6-ring format; this is merely a matter of replacing the binding punching and copyright functions in the PostScript. These have a notional copyright date of 1994, echoing the introduction date of the 6-ring Pocket.
In order to support a wider audience, I decided to create versions for the standard Pocket page width, in the current 6-ring binder. Since the inserts are created algorithmically, given a page size, this is largely a matter of telling the generator what output page size I want. These have a notional copyright date of 1994, echoing the introduction date of the 6-ring Pocket.
Finally, I thought it might be useful to create a set of conventional Pocket-size inserts, that exactly mimic the Personal inserts. Since the 'arbitrary' inserts in the Personal series have 31 lines (one day per month, presumably), with, coincidentally or otherwise, a 1/5" (5.08mm) line spacing, I made a 'Pocket31' set of inserts, with 31 lines (instead of the 26 lines used in the other Pocket sets), with narrower lines. These have a notional copyright date of 1994, echoing the introduction date of the 6-ring Pocket. You might find these useful. Or not. But you have the choice.
All insert generation is now automated; composition to actual size inserts, and then imposition to n-up ISO or US papers for printing. I launch a single script, and this generation takes about 30 minutes to run on my laptop, much of which is actually consumed by the virus checker inspecting the resulting files. Assembling the inserts into the various sets in done semi-automatically by PDFSam, using configuration scripts to identify the required inserts, an the output options.
Each insert is now bookmarked in the PDF, for easy access.
ReplyDeleteThe inserts are grouped into 'functional categories', largely reflecting the original 1984 catalogue, appearing in the sets in the following order:
plain
ruled
quadrille
analysis
cash
graph paper
art & music
diaries, undated
planners, undated
memos
personal
business
military
data sets
freeform
As Steve notes, these start off with the more 'boring' inserts, but the bookmarks will take you to the more 'interesting' examples. My personal favourite might be ref_89_t_polar_plot, partly simply because of how it looks, partly because I know the elegance and simplicity of the hand-written PostScript used to generate it; just 57 lines with five for loops.
It is worth noting that many of the Personal inserts were never released for the Pocket, so many of these inserts are entirely 'new'...
They are not perfect recreations: I don't have access to the Bodoni font used for the original title bars; I have very few real inserts to use as reference, so I have had to measure thumbnails and photos, and infer how some inserts 'must have/should have' been designed. But they are pretty close to the originals, so much so that they include anachronistic fields like telex and fax, although I have included some of my own 'corrected' or updated versions (with an '_kjb' suffix to the name.
I hope you find these inserts interesting and/or useful.