Dirty Little Zine – a tool for making an 8 page printable Zine | Hacker News Reader

Dirty Little Zine – a tool for making an 8 page printable Zine

dirtylittlezine.com

173 pointscianmm41 comments

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:

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!

Zine fest is next month: https://seattlezinefest.org/

Zine meetup every other Friday downtown: https://seattleprintersguild.org/

>We lost gobs of tenants and the riff raff tookover

Not trying to get into an argument but you are no more entitled to the city than your fellow citizens aka the "riff raff"

I'm also not trying to get into an argument, but totally disagree, and honestly believe that your attitude leads to an untenable breakdown of the social contract.

I don't agree with use of the tongue-in-cheek term "riff raff" for unhoused people living in tents and shanties on the sideway. And I think such people deserve help.

But yes, they have less of a right to live on the sidewalk than the right of people and businesses that pay rent and expect public spaces that are usable, safe, and free of people so intoxicated that they have lost contact with reality and are not safe to be around.

And I can't disagree with either, especially the riff raff usage, but the term "takeover" was the one intended to play the important role in the sentence. And it wasn't for the unhoused - but the dealers and traffickers.

Paying rent and taxes and following the law are exactly what entitle someone to more than someone who does not in our society.

“Paying rent”

Is someone living with their friends, relatives, family, entitled to less in a society?

Well, yes. You have less rights over the place you live because you live there entirely at the mercy of the person who legally owns/rents it.

I, a renter, can’t renovate the house I live in. The owner can. You, a house guest, can’t unilaterally decide to change my WiFi password.

I went to the seattle zinefest a couple years back and it was so fun.

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.

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.

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

I won't be clicking on that first link because I'm on a work machine but is that _Limewire_?

yeah, it's totally different from how it used to be, first google search result for file upload and share ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's a Google Drive link with the same files: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jjp8fOn1fsQ0vvix84dm...

It's like pocketmod. I've had these for years for making shortcut manuals.

https://pocketmod.com/

I didn't make this, but came across it and though it felt like the kind of thing HN would appreciate

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

The general name for this category of software is imposition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition

I use the psbook command-line utility for this kind of thing.

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?

Yes, it's literally that. Some are made with just one sheet of paper smartly folded into 8 pages. you can find them in random art stands in small alternative markets. Sometimes music shop, art shops and small independent book publishers.

Since we're on hn, Please start here https://wizardzines.com/

These days they tend to be single sheets of paper folded to look like a small 8 page book. That's the modern cute version. "Back in the day" - meaning the 70's and 80's a 'zine was a mimeographed or photocopied hand made full sized magazine, typically on what we'd call cheap printer paper today.

They were punk rock expressions, with large amounts of collage art, mix media art + poetry, and amateur fiction, and sometimes fan fiction. It was creative expression for people with no outlet: the punks, angry about economics. If you think punk was about music, that's the lie, it was about dead end careers.

Look up Buzzmonger, the (now dead) Dallas music 'Zine and you'll get a pretty good idea.

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYzXlo7zHY4

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.

The following one-liner works for (exactly) 8 pages:

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

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

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.

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?

What is the state of the art regarding open source collaborative desktop publishing? Do exist any usable Wiki to Scribus workflows?

Does anybody know a tool for making a 32 page A5 zine like Bumb books [1] for people with little to no layout tool knowledge?

[1] https://bumpbooks.com/

I believe Affinity Publisher 2 should support it. It's much easier than the 8 pager on a single sheet. They have a booklet printing that handles page ordering

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/190221-bas...

This may help: https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js/

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.

I love that it has the "you wouldn't download a car" font

Fun fact: that was not used under correct licence in those PSAs, so by their own definition they would steal a typeface.

I'm sure I saw someone post the same link a day or so ago.

I like a good zine, but not the ones trumpers make. I don’t like maga zines.

I’ll see myself out

You're gonna be iron like the lion in zine.

I love this, it's like a grown-up PrintShop.

Great idea! I love the simplicity of this app.

Here's another 8-page zine maker, built with Decker: https://micpp.itch.io/hybrid-zine-template-for-decker

vi, pandoc

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