experiments in digital zine making

i want to make zines.

this seems simple enough, right? after all, i did write a mini rant on the importance of preserving uncensored internet communication in the age of billionaire fascist tech bros and used zine culture as its aspirational example. but i want to make a booklet, not a webpage (i say as i'm making a webpage), digitally that could also be printed if one wanted. for this, it would probably be best if i aimed to produce a PDF. FOSS graphical PDF tools probably exist but i, coming from a computer science background, have the most experience making PDFs with laTeX. so, naturally, i bastardized this typesetting system.

when researching, i found a handful of mentions about using laTeX in zine making, but nothing cohesive. so everything you read here is me fucking around and finding out.

creating the PDF

to start, i typed up a rough draft of the zine's text as a basic laTeX document, only getting fucky with some spacing to get everything on the same page.

then it was time to start fucking around. i started with the front cover since i figured that would be the most difficult part and, because of that, would serve as a proof of concept. i didn't plan on having any fancy art, but i wanted some "marker" doodles around the zine. to my pleasant surprise, laTeX handles transparent PNGs very well, or vimTeX figured it out for me (xeLaTeX didn't like them, but we'll touch on that later), and i was able to draw on a transparent background in krita then export as a PNG.

i wanted to keep the rough hand-drawn vibe going, so i knew i needed to change the font. i started with fonts from the laTeX font catalogue, but found the selection of handwritten fonts too limited for my liking. i really wanted to make all words actual text for the best digital reading experience, so i used bastardica to mash together fonts to my liking. once i had a fancy title font and a more legible body font, all that was left was to make laTeX use them. luckily, the fontspec package would allow me to create font families from my native TTFs. unluckily, i needed to change the compilation engine. i installed and tried xeLaTeX first, which did render the fonts but also mangled my PNG, so i switched to luaLaTeX and everything was fine. i'm not questioning it, luaLaTeX it is.

the xcolor package allowed me to easily set the page and text color, a welcome break, and fancyhdr took a bit more configuration but eventually let me style the page numbers. after that, i just needed to style all of the text i already typed and reformat it as needed. this part took the longest but i won't ramble on about lots of boring typesetting stuff like changing the default font family and size, stopping laTeX from hyphenating words, left-aligning text, breaking lines, etc. if i were actually good with laTeX this would probably have been the easiest.

at this point, i had all of the text content as i wanted and it was time to figure out how to draw "on" the pages. for my cover image i just used grapicx and inserted the image like normal, but i wanted the back cover to ignore margins. for this, i used tikz. i then used tikz again to draw "on" a page by making the tikz image take up the full page, copying the page to a PNG, opening said PNG in krita, drawing over the "page" on a new layer, and using that layer as a tikz picture. this was in no way efficient but i can't think of a better way of doing it. luckily, i only wanted to do this on one page.

the zine, at this point, was done. in total, it took 167 lines of laTeX, which is nowhere near as bad as i expected. if i ever find myself doing this regularly, i would greatly benefit from streamlining the process through templates and makefiles and bash scripts and custom compilation settings, but for now i'll leave that for future me. the main bottleneck was drawing "on" the pages, but i imagine a script that takes a number, converts that page number of the PDF to a PNG, then opens it in krita, would greatly help with that (...and a "quick export" option in krita, but i'm not planning on learning C++ any time soon).

the zine may be done, however, the experiment isn't over yet.

bringing it into the real world

i want to see if this zine is actually print-friendly. i ended up making the original screen version of the zine and two printing variants: black and white and uncolored background. i used the zine arranger to format the printing variants. i hate my printer, so i'll just be printing the black and white version to save myself some headache.

the result is... something... the margins are fucked, partially because of my printer and partially because of me, so the folding instructions were off.

i decided i was better at sewing than origami so i cut the pages and used a needle and thread to put them together. i've never done book binding before so i sewed it like fabric. but it mostly works! the zine is now 3D!! again, if i find myself doing this regularly then i would fuck with my printer settings and learn bookbinding to make this easier. if you have a good relationship with your printer then this part is probably a non-issue (heh).

distribution

the zine can be found with my other files for download and you are free to do whatever you want with it. since the source files are so small, you'll also find everything you need to compile it yourself as an optional part of the download. i compiled it in vimTeX, so you won't find a makefile or anything similar, but it's a single tex file so i'd imagine whatever method you usually use will work (as long as it uses luaLaTeX). if you choose to print your own, the assembly instructions can be found on the zine arranger.