alt.hn

6/20/2026 at 6:58:14 PM

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

 https://dirtylittlezine.com/

by cianmm

6/24/2026 at 2:48:52 AM

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!

by ynac

6/24/2026 at 12:09:47 PM

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

by scragz

6/24/2026 at 11:28:14 AM

>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"

by yur3i__

6/24/2026 at 1:01:20 PM

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.

by ipsento606

6/24/2026 at 1:52:06 PM

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.

by ynac

6/24/2026 at 2:15:02 PM

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

by allthetime

6/24/2026 at 6:39:03 PM

“Paying rent”

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

by adjejmxbdjdn

6/24/2026 at 1:15:41 PM

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

by markvdb

6/24/2026 at 9:40:17 AM

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.

by fmajid

6/24/2026 at 10:41:54 AM

[dead]

by drunkboxer

6/21/2026 at 5:58:59 PM

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

https://pocketmod.com/

by AstroJetson

6/24/2026 at 7:21:05 AM

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?

by voidUpdate

6/24/2026 at 10:41:09 AM

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.

by bsenftner

6/24/2026 at 7:52:11 AM

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.

by Pentamerous

6/24/2026 at 3:13:13 PM

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

by PyWoody

6/24/2026 at 2:56:42 PM

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

by lightedman

6/24/2026 at 6:19:24 AM

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

by sieste

6/20/2026 at 6:58:14 PM

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

by cianmm

6/24/2026 at 6:40:29 AM

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

by zserge

6/24/2026 at 11:53:04 AM

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.

by pavel_lishin

6/24/2026 at 1:23:55 PM

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

by BodyCulture

6/24/2026 at 9:28:03 AM

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?

by mahdi7d1

6/24/2026 at 12:38:39 PM

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/

by maurits

6/24/2026 at 9:04:36 AM

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

by notThrowingAway

6/24/2026 at 12:42:12 AM

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

by verdverm

6/24/2026 at 12:57:36 PM

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

by cianmm

6/24/2026 at 2:16:08 PM

Great idea! I love the simplicity of this app.

by sgallant

6/24/2026 at 6:49:07 AM

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

by flopsamjetsam

6/24/2026 at 4:22:14 AM

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

I’ll see myself out

by onionisafruit

6/24/2026 at 6:05:31 AM

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

by kleiba2

6/24/2026 at 9:29:54 AM

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

by ares623

6/24/2026 at 2:09:44 AM

vi, pandoc

by syngrog66