I've gotten super into Zine making this year and love this mini-8-pager format. I typically carry them around to share information with others, and get back to a world of print in our digital divide. People really like the bite size knowledge they can fit in a pocket.
I picked up a slightly different format which is double sided and two per piece of paper.
The hardest parts of formatting these are (a) not making the font too small (b) getting the folds to land in the middle of pages (if you are OCD about that like me)
Seattle used to have a top notch zine scene - entire sections of stores (music, magazine, comic, game) would have hundreds of local and national zines.
Recently, Seattle's been trying to make a comeback downtown. We lost gobs of tenants and the riff raff tookover. One element of the comeback strategy is this Seattle Restored project. Basically, rent free storefronts to small businesses.
For father's day my ladies brought me to one of them:
While not directly a zine, I'm liking some of the small format game publications (mostly modules and add ons) in the Shadowdark / OSR / MOthership ecosystem. Something small, concise and easy to take with you.
The zine enthusiasts in this thread might enjoy this little tool I made to print out and zine-fold Project Gutenberg books: https://github.com/sieste/pocketbook
Was doing a similar thing for plain HTML zines: https://github.com/zserge/zine - write each page as html, render as page previews in browser and as a folded zine when printed
I keep hearing about zines and how they're cool and awesome, but I've never really seen one, so I can't really get a sense in my head for what they are. Does anyone have like an online gallery of zines or something? Are they literally just a small, independently made magazine?
There was a TV show, Our Hero[0], that aired in the 2000s that was about Zines. I can't say I've ever seen a "zine" irl so I can't say how accurate of the "scene" it was, but it's definitely a blast-from-the-past.
At your nearest city library if you're lucky. Christchurch's Tūranga public library has a stand of them although the stand isn't in an obvious place. Apart from that I've only seen them in local arty/hipster shops. I'm guessing avoiding publication on the internet is part of the appeal.
I didn't know about zines before and they seem interesting but aren't we wasting half of the paper surface (from what I understood looking at some images) A printer spread achieves a similar result without wasting one side of the sheet. (A bit more folding and cutting involved)
* Or does one put additional content pages inside which are supposed to be read by unfolding the zine and folding it the other way?
Is there one of these for making a 12-page chick tract style one, so I can print a two sided single page with six segments on each side? I arranged something myself in photo editing software, but it's off just a little bit in a way that drives me nuts.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 61.5 ms ] threadhttps://pocketmod.com/
I picked up a slightly different format which is double sided and two per piece of paper.
PDF example and Affinity Publisher 2 files: https://limewire.com/d/Vi7Td#q7xsY0HXLY
The hardest parts of formatting these are (a) not making the font too small (b) getting the folds to land in the middle of pages (if you are OCD about that like me)
(edit, added both file types for a few examples)
This is another online zine maker I came across as well which supports markdown / json: https://zeenster.com/ | https://github.com/virgilvox/zine-maker
If you want to mass produce them
- Brother Inkjet Printer
- HFS guillotine paper cutter
- Martin Yale P7200 RapidFold
Recently, Seattle's been trying to make a comeback downtown. We lost gobs of tenants and the riff raff tookover. One element of the comeback strategy is this Seattle Restored project. Basically, rent free storefronts to small businesses.
For father's day my ladies brought me to one of them:
https://seattlerestored.org/locations/paper-pushers-print-sh...
They had about a thousand zines and variants. I was told my minimum spend and nailed it. So much fun. In the area, go!
I’ll see myself out
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYzXlo7zHY4
* Or does one put additional content pages inside which are supposed to be read by unfolding the zine and folding it the other way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition
I use the psbook command-line utility for this kind of thing.
[1] https://bumpbooks.com/
I use it for making books but it may be a better option than some of the other projects linked here depending on what exactly you are trying to do.
pdfjam in.pdf '1,8,7,6' --angle 180 --outfile /dev/stdout | pdfjam /dev/stdin '1-4' test.pdf '2,3,4,5' --nup 4x2 --landscape --frame false --outfile out.pdf