Update! Now I use Spectrolite and our ANEMONE risograph printer for majority of zines; we added in zine imposition for 11x17 and other large size riso machines into that. But also it does zine imposition for half letter zines, so if you want to just make a zine on a regular printer, you can use the Spectrolite template for a letter size paper sheet! I will sometimes proof one copy of the zine on letter size paper with the laser-jet printer before riso printing it.
Original version as of 2020:
I've been getting my publishing workflow figured out, and wanted to share some notes in case they're useful to anyone, and for my future self too:
Poems for Covid-19 by Amy Bornman is the first print publication I've made for my publishing imprint ANEMONE. Here's what I used:
- Google Docs to communicate with Amy about edits to the poems, and front and back matter details.
- Scrivener to lay out the zine and export it as a PDF at the right size, as well as exporting .epub and .mobi files for the digital edition.
- pdflatex to make the booklets, see code below.
- Printed on Cream Hammermill Paper 24 lb. (90 g/m2) for interior pages, and Ivory Neenah Bristol Vellum 67 lb (147 g/m2) for the cover.
- Printed with a Brother HL-L2390DW laser printer. This was a run of 25, in the future I'll print mostly with a risograph machine for larger production runs.
- Long-arm stapler for saddle stitch binding. Now I use an electric stapler, Rapid 106.
- A stack cutter Guillo-Max 17" to trim down the edges
I’m so happy thinking about all the publishing to come, and so excited this book is out in the world!
This is the code, which I learned from Julia Evans' Ways to write zines without fancy tools blog post:
\batchmode
\documentclass[letter,landscape]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[monochrome]{xcolor}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
% the next line is the only line you need to edit
\includepdfmerge[booklet=true,landscape=false,signature=20,scale=0.97,
offset=0cm 0cm,delta=0cm 0cm,trim=0mm 0mm 0mm 0mm,clip]{compiled.pdf,1-20}
\end{document}
And in terminal to run the code, the line: pdflatex formatted-zine.tex