What settings to use to print this zine?

September 2, 2024 1:26 AM

How to print this zine? Is there something I'm missing so that it can fold and make sense?
posted by andoatnp to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

I think it’s not designed to be printed as a booklet, because of the layout of the pages but also because there are 14 pages, and 14 isn’t a multiple if 4. So to print it you’d need to cut the pages in half, add extra blank pages to make it 16 pages, and then do the imposition to make it printable
posted by technotaco at 3:16 AM on September 2 [3 favorites]

Yeah, if you want to print it and you have access to the original document, you need to lay it out as

Sheet 1 - front cover on the left side and back cover on the right side
Sheet 2 - New page for inside front cover and inside back cover to get you to the 16 page count needed for printing front/back correctly. You could leave both blank or add text
Sheet 3 - first page of text (counting as p. 3 for this purpose) on the left and p. 14 on the right
Sheet 4 - p 4 (L) and p 13 (R)
Sheet 5 - p 5 and p 12
Sheet 6 - p 6 and p 11
Sheet 7 - p 7 and p 10
Sheet 8 - p 8 and 9

When it's copied front/back, folded and stapled, the page flow will read as it does in your current doc.

(somebody who's done desktop publishing pls check my page numbers - it's early here and I have to run)
posted by Sweetie Darling at 3:48 AM on September 2

Adobe Acrobat Reader (even the free version) has an option to reformat an entire book/let for printing! Learnt this from my zine pals.
posted by lokta at 4:11 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

I normally handle this by splitting the PDF back into separate pages. You can then layout the document any way you want when printing. On Windows, there is a free utility I use for this called Briss. The latest release is here: https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0/releases/tag/v2.0-alpha-5

I tried it on your file and it worked well, DM me your email if you want me to send it.
posted by SNACKeR at 5:23 AM on September 2

The printer drivers for a lot of laser printers (typically the kind capable of double-sided printing) frequently feature a booklet mode as well, which can rearrange pages to make two-sheet or four-sheet stapled booklets come out properly. LibreOffice Draw also has this functionality built in if your printer driver doesn't. But as far as I'm aware, none of that helps with a document like this whose pages have already been pre-composed in pairs for easier on-screen viewing.

I loathe Adobe software and am comfortable with the command line, so I installed the mupdf-tools package on my Debian box (it's also available for Windows and for Mac OS via Homebrew) and ran the following commands:

mutool poster -x 2 BEL-Zine-1.pdf pages.pdf

This takes the 7-page PDF as downloaded and splits each page into two equal pieces to make a 14-page output file. The result is a little weird in that the right-hand half of each original page ends up as the page before its left-hand half in the pages.pdf output file, but we can work with that.

mutool merge -o cover.pdf pages.pdf 13,2

This selects the back and front cover pages from the file made by the first step, and writes them as a new document named cover.pdf which has the back cover as page 1 and the front cover as page 2. Pretty much any printer driver will let you select two pages per sheet as a print option, and that puts the covers in the right order for folding around the booklet.

mutool merge -o content.pdf pages.pdf 8,7,10,5,6,9,12,3,4,11,14,1

This selects the content pages from the file made by the first step, and writes them as a new document named content.pdf whose pages are in the right order to make a booklet suitable for folding and centre stapling of you print them two per sheet with flip-on-short-edge duplexing. Don't use the reverse print order option if you have it - these pages are ordered on the assumption that the printer will process pages in the order it's given them and that the duplexer will pile them up in the tray with the second side uppermost.

I chose to do cover.pdf and content.pdf as two separate documents rather than inserting blank pages into a single one because if you're printing a bunch of these it's easy to use a different paper colour for the covers and not having to turn on duplexing for those will make them print faster too. Links are to copies I left for you in my Dropbox in case you can't be arsed re-doing all this at your end.
posted by flabdablet at 8:40 AM on September 2 [1 favorite]

If printing this specific edition is a one-off project for you, and you're going to print a lot of them, and your printer either doesn't have a duplexer or has a slow one, and you'd rather print all the front sides before returning that whole printed stack to the feed tray to do the back sides, you should be able to achieve that by printing only selected page ranges from content.pdf as well as turning on two-pages-per-sheet and turning off duplexing.

Print pages 1-2,5-6,9-10 on the first pass and pages 11-12,7-8,3-4 on the second. Do a test run of one copy to validate your understanding of which way the printed stack needs to be put back in the tray to make the other side go on the other side and be the right way up. Then do another test run of two copies to make sure they end up collated the way you expect (there will be a collation option somewhere in the print dialogs that you might need to ask for multiple copies to enable).

If you'd rather each of those page selections was its own little PDF document to make the print settings less error-prone, mutool can easily do that:

mutool merge -o pass1.pdf content.pdf 1-2,5-6,9-10
mutool merge -o pass2.pdf content.pdf 11-12,7-8,3-4

posted by flabdablet at 9:55 AM on September 2

The backs and fronts should all match up correctly regardless of whether collation is turned on or not, but if you're doing more than a few tens of copies you should probably leave it turned off so that you end up with three stacks of pages to collate by hand. That way you won't waste as many if the printer decides to misfeed a sheet, which it will be more likely to do when re-handling pages that have already been printed on one side especially if they're still warm.
posted by flabdablet at 10:03 AM on September 2

I agree with Sweetie Darling _except_ I think the first sheet should have the back cover on the left and the front cover on the right, so when you fold in the center and put the fold on the left the front cover will be on the front.
posted by TimHare at 3:48 PM on September 2 [1 favorite]