State of the PIXLS

Zine publishing with FLOSS

Patrick David & Mica Semrich

Day 29th May

SHORT TALKS

18:00

An overview of the PIXLS.US photography community.

A (short) look at the goings-on with the community of Free Software photographers, projects, and supporters.

Mara Karagianni

Day 29th May

SHORT TALKS

18:30

The term zine comes from small magazine/fanzine, and it mostly refers to DIY and self publications with low production cost, intended for sharing niche ideas and skills. As a zine maker myself, I started off with Scribus for the layout and page signatures creation, and recently I moved on to code my own scripts for generating my tech zines from text documents. In this talk, I will showcase my journey in zine making from using a desktop tool to python scripting.

The term zine comes from small magazine/fanzine, and it mostly refers to DIY and self publications with low production cost, intended for sharing niche skills, personal, obscure, and creative stories. Making a zine for an A4 size printer, requires some paper folding and arrangement of signatures. In this talk I will demonstrate how I moved my favorite A5 zine template from Scribus to Python FPDF scripting. The process deals with how to parse text and create signatures (aka making two or more pages within one A4 page) that can fold into each other to create a booklet. Moreover it covers how to place titles and images within the text, in order to generate a PDF document ready for the printer without touching the mouse. I will of course briefly illustrate what signatures are by showcasing some of my own tech related zines. At last, I'd refer to the possibility of introducing some random or dynamic patterns when generating print material with a script..