Hi:
I'm looking into renewing my membership, so I've been looking around the LCCA website and I have a few questions:
1. I was under the impression we could renew as either a regular member or as an electronic member. The renewal page on the website only gives me the option of renewing as a regular member.
I'm considering going with the e membership for two reasons 1) save $10 in fees and 2) less clutter around the house from stacks of magazines.
2. Since the start of the digital publications in April of 2014, has the LCCA stopped putting pdf versions of The Lion Roars (TLR) in the Archive section?
I really like the pdf downloads of TLR. When I joined a few years ago, I downloaded the prior years and I've kept up and downloaded TLR magazines as they appeared on the LCCA website. The last pdf version of TLR on the website is the Feb 2014 issue.
3. There doesn't appear to be an easy way to download the newer issues of TLR via the "powered by 3DIssue" system. The LCCA digital publications web page says this is the same system as used by Lionel for their catalogs. On the Lionel catalogs, there is an option to download the catalog as a pdf. This option doesn't appear to be available on the LCCA system.
The other way to accomplish this is to print out the TLR issue as a PDF. This didn't work properly. I tried to print out the Oct 14 issue. This issue has 44 pages. First, there is no option to select all the pages with one click. You need to go through and separately click on each of the 44 pages. Second, I was unable to print out all 44 pages. I tried numerous times, and the program takes a minute or so to process the command, and then it randomly varies the number of pages it prints!!! It varied from 33 to 37 to 38 to 40 pages, skipping the last pages. Third, the file size of the pdf I was able to print out, even though it didn't print the complete issue, was much larger than the file size of pdf versions of TLR issues on the LCCA Archives web page. The archive pdf files average around 5 MB in size. I tried different programs to print the Oct 14 TLR issue as a pdf, and even though it wouldn't print the complete issue, the file size varied from 15 MB to 110 MB, depending on the program. This isn't an efficient way to store the issues of TLR on my computer.
I also played around with the Nov 14 issue of Interchange Track (IT). This issue is only 14 pages. I was able to print out all 14 pages as a pdf file, but the file size varied from 4 MB to 13 MB depending on the program. This is a little large for a 14 page document, but at least it works.
While the new 3DIssue program the LCCA is using allows members to view the issues of TLR and IT on our computers, in my experience, it doesn't work very well for downloading and saving the issues on a computer. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who wants to keep an "archive" of TLR issues on my computer. The old method the LCCA used for TLR archives was easy to download and the file sizes were small. The new program doesn't work properly and yields much larger file sizes. This is a major step backwards in benefits for LCCA members.
