A small script for formatting zines suitable so that they can be printed on your home printer on US letter paper. It uses pdftk/pdfjam/pdfcrop behind the scenes.
apt-get install pdfjam pdftk texlive-extra-utils
Format requirements: the inputs to --zine
and --cover
must be 4inchx6inch files. (or at least a
2:3 aspect ratio)
- Take an input zine like this: https://jvns.ca/strace-zine-v2.pdf
- Add a little padding to every page so that nothing gets cut off
- Truncate the input zine to the number of pages specified in
--pages
- Create a US letter page booklet like this: https://jvns.ca/strace-zine-v2-print.pdf
There's also an optional --cover
argument. If you include a cover, it'll cut off the first page of your zine and replace
it with the supplied cover page.
# Fetch a zine to generate the print version of
git clone https://github.com/jvns/zine-formatter.py
cd zine-formatter
wget https://jvns.ca/strace-zine-v2.pdf
python zine-formatter.py \
--zine strace-zine-v2.pdf \
--pages 16 \
--view-output strace-zine-view.pdf \
--print-output strace-zine-print.pdf