Korsakovia: The Mod: The Book
(This post was originally written around May, 2019. I found it rotting in my drafts.)
I got into bookbinding before Christmas of last year. It’s a slow and frustrating skill to acquire; most of your time is spent repeatedly folding paper, punching holes, cutting board, or waiting for glue to dry. However, it’s rewarding when everything comes together.
Yesterday, I put the finishing touches on this:
Yes, Korsakovia can now be ingested in book form! I’m going to outline the high level process of taking the book from unformatted script to printed product.
Step 1: Formatting the Script
The script is publicly available on ModDB. Sure, you could take that, print it on A4 paper, then spiral bind it, but that’s too easy and lacks pizzazz. This script deserves better than Courier New!
There are several programs you can use to lay out text:
Word processors, like Microsoft Office (proprietary) or LibreOffice (free). They work OK, but they place emphasis on text layout. This makes them pretty inflexible.
Desktop publishing software, like Adobe InDesign (proprietary) or Microsoft Publisher (proprietary) or Scribus (free). This places emphasis on laying out each individual page, which gives a lot of freedom but also a lot of work to ensure everything stays consistent.
I was using LibreOffice but I found Scribus easier to work with.
At this point, you have to think ahead a bit:
What paper will you be printing on? I have an abundance of letter size copy paper. Folded in half, this makes 5.5″ x 8.5″ pages. In Scribus, you can set that as a custom size, then indicate that it’s double-sided (so it previews in 2 columns)
What are the margins of your printer? I have a Brother HL-L2390DW which can’t print anything around 0.166″ (1/6″) from the edge of the paper. You can sort of get around this by choosing “Page size: Fit” if printing in something like Adobe Acrobat then trimming that off after binding. This is what I ended up doing, but beware that it messes with proportions (everything is scaled down) and decreases the size after binding! (Alternatively, don’t use images that need to bleed to the edge of the margin!)
I’ll post my tips for working effectively with Scribus in another post.
Now it’s just a matter of creating pages, styles, and frames, then copying the text over from the PDF. This takes a lot of manual, tedious labour.
I ended up with around 44 formatted pages. This is a pretty small book. I decided at this point to use a perfect binding. I wanted to use case binding but I would have very few signatures and a thin spine. Sometimes you have to figure out how to bind it this early on because it can impact the inner margins, as well as the imposition step.
When you’re done, you can export to PDF... but it doesn’t look like it’s ready for printing 2 column, double-sided. What gives?
Step 2: Imposition
Imposition is the step where you take the individual 5.5″ x 8.5″ single pages and lay them out to be printed on letter size paper. The catch is that it needs to be printed in such a way that it can be read properly after it’s bound! You’ve probably taken this for granted if you’ve printed anything from a word processor.
Scribus, very purposefully, does not provide imposition features. I used PdfBooklet. It’s a bit rough around the edges but does a pretty good job.
I used the default settings for a booklet because I’m going to cut the pages in half later to be bound. (This ended up being a bad choice due to how my printer bowed the paper during printing. I have a noticeable split in the middle of my book.)
(Editor me from the future, I would go on to write my own imposition workflow in Python using pdfimpose. Highly recommend!)
Step 3: Printing
PdfBooklet produces a PDF ready for printing. I used Adobe Acrobat because I like the quality with which it renders the pages for preview. I also know what settings to use in it’s printing dialog.
The HL-L2390DW does double-sided printing, so I checked Print on both sides of paper and selected Flip on short edge. This is important, otherwise half the pages will be upside down when bound!
As mentioned before, under Page Sizing & Handling, I chose Fit.
You can do a quick check at this point to make sure it will read like a book. Since it was printed like a booklet, you can fold the stack gently in half and see if you can flip through it like a book.
Step 4: Binding (finally!)
I ended up with 22 printed sheets. I stacked them and cut them into the 5.5 x 8.5″ sheets of paper. Until bound, you can hold the resulting stack of 44 sheets together with binder clips. I slapped some PVA glue on the spine, then wrapped it in construction paper.
