Prepping for the SF Pen Show

I'm lucky that the SF Pen Show is my "home" show, as it's a pretty big one, and is referred to as "the fun pen show". 😀 This will be my second time attending, and I got the 3-day pass, though I'm not sure if I'll attend all three days. Last year I was pretty overwhelmed looking at everything (and I still missed stuff), and was way too shy to approach anyone I recognized from YouTube, podcasts, or blogs. This year, I'm going to try to meet up with other fountain pen people I've met online. Should be fun! I am always the most anxious before meeting people, but once I've started a conversation with them, the shyness usually goes away, or is greatly diminished. 😅

Anyway, in preparation for the show, I ended up dumping the exhibitor list from the official show site into a Google Sheet and doing some rapid-fire searching for the main webpages for each one. In some cases I couldn't find a page, or wasn't sure if the site I found was really attributable to the vendor, so some are blank or have a question mark and a tentative URL. This was helpful research because there were a lot of exhibitors who I knew nothing about before.

Looking back, I probably could've figured out a way to automate the Google searches I did and get maybe 80-90% of the URLs I found, because the vendors have good SEO and their site was usually the top result. Then I could've done the research for the other 10% manually and saved time that way. I may mess around with figuring out how to do that anyway, for curiosity's sake. Feel free to make a copy of my spreadsheet for your reference.

I also wished that the show floor map on the official site had the vendor names on it instead of table numbers that you have to cross-reference with their exhibitor list (I added the table numbers to my vendor spreadsheet). My pie-in-the-sky idea was to make an interactive floor map that would pop up vendor info as you hover over or tap on tables. I thought perhaps I could import the show floor map into something like Figma and somehow mock up some interactivity that way. The map from the official site was a bitmap image, and zooming in made it quite pixelated. So my first thought was to convert it into a vector image, but the free online conversion tools weren't doing that great a job, so I resigned myself to creating a vector drawing myself. I didn't really have any experience with vector drawing apps like Inkscape, but I figured out enough to trace the original map and go through the painstaking process of labeling the tables.

First I labeled them with numbers, in the hope that I could import the vector drawing into Figma and impart some interactive magic there, but Figma's imported version of my map was all sorts of messed up. Yay, incompatible files, or whatever! 😝 I gave up on trying to figure out the interactive map thing and decided to make a labeled version of the vector drawing. As I went along, I started to figure out some short cuts to more efficiently do this, but I was still labeling each table or groups of tables manually. The bright side is that I now have a clean vector drawing of the SF pen show map, and won't have to do as much work to update it for next year's exhibitor list...in theory. I'm also hoping next year the official site will have more information on the exhibitors and a labeled map so I don't have to do it myself. 🤞

I downloaded this SVG to my phone, and thankfully I can view it without need of any other apps (the font is different from my desktop view, but 🤷‍♀️). I have an (older) iPhone, so YMMV. Hopefully people find this helpful! Keep in mind the info on the map is current as of the afternoon of Aug 20. I am not planning on making any updates to the map, unless I see some pretty big changes. I'll try to post an update in that case, but the map should still be useful even if some info is slightly out-of-date. I'll probably print out a copy to have on hand, even though I'll have it on my phone.

Now I have to think of what pens I'll bring to the show (feeling pretty apprehensive about bringing valuable pens, but I will do it anyway), what notebook, etc. This year's budget is pretty small, but hopefully I can enjoy looking even if I'm not buying. 😅😅😅 Are you going to the SF pen show? Maybe I'll see you there!