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?

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!

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

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

https://pocketmod.com/

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

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

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

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

I’ll see myself out

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

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

vi, pandoc