Zine and Booklet Maker

Pull the staples out of a twelve-page booklet and look at the middle sheet. One side shows pages 6 and 7, which is what you expected. Turn it over and you find 8 on the left and 5 on the right. Lift the next sheet and page 10 sits beside page 3. Nothing has gone wrong.

The pages were arranged that way on purpose, and the arrangement has a name. Matt Roberts and Don Etherington, in their 1982 dictionary of bookbinding, define imposition as the plan of arrangement of the pages so that they will read consecutively when the printed sheet is folded. The word means, literally, in position, and it comes from letterpress printing. Reading order belongs to the finished object. The sheet has a different job: get every page to the right place, the right way up, for a fold that has not happened yet.

The fold is the rule

Start with the unit. Fold a sheet once and it becomes two leaves, each with a page on both sides: four pages. Fold again and the count doubles. The dictionary’s entry on folding gives the whole run, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 leaves, giving 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 pages, and notes that a sheet is rarely folded more than four times in bookwork.

Each folded set is a section. Printers put a sequential mark of identification on its first page, and that mark, strictly, was the signature. The dictionary concedes that little if any distinction is made between the two words today. Either way, the thing they name is the reason for imposition: a group of pages that share one piece of paper and must come out of the folder in order.

Folds double, so pages arrive in fours, eights and sixteens, never in fives. That is why a home-made booklet with ten pages of content has twelve pages, two of them blank. Adobe says the same of the booklet printing in its page-layout program: the page count must be divisible by four, or blank pages are added to complete the last signature.

One sheet, one cut, three folds

The zine is about the smallest publishing unit there is. The Barnard Zine Library describes it as a self-publication, usually made on paper and reproduced with a photocopier or printer. One fold suits the photocopier especially well, because all eight of its pages sit on one side of a single sheet.

It has many names. The artist and bookmaking teacher Paula Beardell Krieg calls it the origami pamphlet and writes that she has come across many, many sets of instructions for it. Wikibooks files it as an 8-sided zine from 1 sheet with 1 cut. Crease the sheet in half both ways, then crease the long direction into quarters. Cut along the center line, but only between the two quarter creases. Fold the sheet in half lengthwise with the pages on the outside, push the ends toward each other until the middle opens into a cross, and close the cross like a book with the front page outermost.

The plan that makes this work is short. Along the bottom of the sheet, left to right and upright, go pages 6, 7 and 8 and then page 1, so the back cover and the front cover sit side by side at the bottom right. Along the top go 5, 4, 3 and 2, every one of them upside down. The lengthwise fold carries the top row over to the back, where upside down becomes upright. So the pages printed upside down are 2, 3, 4 and 5.

The tool here does not take that plan on trust. It carries the eight panels through the folds as rigid pieces and reads the finished stack: 1 to 8, all upright. Move one number and the check fails.

It also turns up something the diagrams rarely mention. The cross has four arms, and any one of them can be closed as the front leaf. Slide all eight numbers two panels along the loop and the sheet still folds into a zine, with a different arm in front. Slide them one panel and no way of closing the cross puts the pages in order. Count every case and 4 of 8 shifts work.

Size follows from the sheet. Letter paper is 8.5 by 11 inches, so each of the eight panels is 2 3/4 by 4 1/4 inches. An A4 sheet is 210 by 297 mm, which gives 74 by 105 mm to the nearest millimeter, and that is exactly A7. The coincidence is designed. The A series keeps a height to width ratio of the square root of two, so a sheet cut in half across its long side is always the next size down in the same proportions. US sizes cannot do that; they alternate between ratios of 1.294 and 1.545 as they halve.

Two staples and the second side

A booklet is one section with wire through its spine. The dictionary’s entry for saddle stitching describes securing the leaves of a section through the center fold by means of wire staples, and credits the method with full openability to the gutter. Every sheet is folded once, the sheets are nested, and the cover is simply the outermost one.

The arithmetic is different from the zine’s and simpler. Number the sheets from the outside, starting at zero, in a booklet of N pages. The outside of sheet s carries page N minus 2s on the left and page 1 plus 2s on the right. Its inside carries page 2 plus 2s on the left and page N minus 1 minus 2s on the right. Every side adds up to N plus 1, which is a quick check for any layout you are handed.

Take twelve pages on Letter paper: choose Booklet above and leave the sample at 12 pages. Three sheets come out. The first has 12 and 1 outside and 2 and 11 inside. The second has 10 and 3, then 4 and 9. The third has 8 and 5, then 6 and 7, the centerfold. The two numbers on every side add up to 13. Each finished page is 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches, half the long side of the sheet, and at 300 dots per inch it measures 1650 by 2550 pixels. Wikibooks draws the same scheme for sixteen pages, with 16 beside 1 on the outermost sheet.

A zine is printed on one side. A booklet is not, and something has to turn the sheet over. There are two ways to turn it, and the Internet Printing Protocol names both. With two-sided-long-edge the pages come out right for a reader as if bound on the long edge, an arrangement the standard says is sometimes called duplex or head-to-head. With two-sided-short-edge they suit binding on the short edge, sometimes called tumble or head-to-toe.

A booklet sheet lies on its side with the fold across the middle, so it is a short-edge job. The CUPS printing documentation puts it in one line: the short-edge option is suitable for landscape pages, the long-edge option for portrait pages. The LibreOffice help reaches the same setting from the other side: brochures always print in landscape, so a duplex printer should be set to duplex, short edge. Choose the long-edge flip by mistake and the back of every sheet comes out upside down against its front. Some printers offer only that flip. For those the tool turns every back side by 180 degrees, and the fold simulation confirms that the pages still read from 1 to N.

Thickness, grain and the edge of the paper

Paper has thickness, and a nested booklet shows it. Adobe describes paper thickness that causes inner pages to extend past outer pages after folding. Its remedy, creep, holds the cover still and moves the pages of the inner sheets toward the spine, a little more on each sheet. The total is divided by the number of sheets minus one. In Adobe’s example a 16-page booklet of four sheets with 24 points of creep moves its pages by 0, 4, 8 and 12 points, counting from the cover inward.

The tool uses the same even steps and asks for one number, the shift of the innermost pages. It is an approximation, and it stays off until you ask for it. The dependable way to find the number is the dummy, which printers make by folding sheets of paper the way the job will be folded. Fold the paper you mean to use and measure how far the middle sheet sticks out.

Grain is the other physical fact. Machine-made paper has a machine direction, the way most of its fibers lie. The dictionary is blunt about what to do with it: a well-produced book always has the grain running from head to tail, so that the binding fold is not against the grain. Its leaves are then more inclined to lie flat. A booklet folded from Letter or A4 has its spine parallel to the short edge of the sheet. The one-sheet zine folds in both directions, so one of its folds always fights the grain.

Then there is the edge. The W3C’s paged media specification describes a non-printable area, usually a small region along each edge of the sheet that a printer cannot mark reliably, and its size depends on the printer. The Wikibooks guide to zine making gives the working advice: many photocopiers do not copy all the way to the edge of the page, most printers do not print there either, and the cure is an empty border around the work so that nothing is chopped off. The margin setting exists for that. A bleed, a printed image that runs off the edge of a page, is made by trimming, and this tool draws neither bleed nor trim marks.

What a simulation of paper leaves out

The exported pages are exact in one respect. A point is 1/72 inch, so a Letter sheet on its side is 792 by 612 points, and the PDF has one page of that size for each side of each sheet. Print it at 100 percent. A dialog that shrinks the page to fit also moves every fold line toward the middle.

The limits are just as plain. The booklet is a single section. Perfect binding, which holds trimmed pages to a cover with adhesive and groups them into several signatures, needs a different imposition that is not offered here. For a long document the usual answer is several booklets bound as one book: Wikipedia’s article on imposition describes a book printed two pages to a side, folded, gathered into signatures of eight sheets and sewn. Resolution is capped at 16,777,216 pixels a side to spare a phone’s memory, so an A3 sheet requested at 300 dots per inch is drawn at 294.

The simulated paper has no thickness and no stiffness. It proves the order of the pages. How many leaves can really be stitched, the dictionary warns, depends to a great degree on the thickness of the paper.

None of this replaces the test that has always settled the matter. Print one copy, fold it, and turn the pages. If page 2 follows page 1, the plan was right. The simulation only spares you the paper.