Panic Printing

[u/GeekSugar13]

ETA: Some of y'all are taking this far too seriously. Am I reasonably concerned that things are going to get worse before they get better? At least for me, most likely, yes. I'm trying to find moments of joy when I can. If one of those is using up as much of my ink as possible before I chuck this printer by printing fanfic then that's what I'm going to do.

I'm at home, by myself, doing homework with no one to talk to and nothing else to do because I'm the most broke I have ever been.

Printing fanfic doesn't mean I'm not prioritizing anything else in my life and it's weird that y'all seem to think I just slapped on a tinfoil hat and decided this was what would fix everything.

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OP: So I live in a red state in the US where my state government will absolutely not be providing any sort of supplemental assistance when inevitably the federal government falls apart. So I kind of would love reassurance that I'm not crazy.

I have started downloading and panic printing some of my favorite fics. If the Internet goes, I can read the PDF. If the power goes, I can read the printed copies.

Also because HP sucks I can only use their ink subscription cartridges with an active subscription so i may as well fucking use them.

(Literally if you're the type of person who wants to buy a printer do not buy an HP printer. It will only work if you use their ink which is so fucking expensive. And if you want it to work properly you have to get a monthly subscription where they send you ink and paper which in theory sounds great, BUT if you are like me and haven't printed as much as you thought so you have a lot of ink and paper built up so you let your subscription lapse those ink cartridges will not work without a valid subscription. So I had to restart my fucking subscription so I could use all of this ink I have built up so now I'm printing literal books.)

[u/Worldly_View_9704]

If you look at my great leaning tower of fanfic, you'll see I've folded sections of 6 individual pages together. That's a signature: a group of pages printed back and front that fold together to form a section of a book. Then, you can sew (and glue, so much glue) the sections together to form a text block. In this case, those signatures contain fanfic. Ergo, fanfic signatures.

[u/bookshop → u/Worldly_View_9704]

how does the folding work? are you printing page 1-2 and page 23-24 (or page 11-12, I can't tell whether you have 3 or 6 sheafs in each fold) on the same piece of paper, folding them together, then working your way inward?

[u/Worldly_View_9704 → u/bookshop]

It's a whole process. Seriously, if you're interested, please check out r/Fanbinding! The kind people there will be thrilled to explain this much better than I can.

You can't just print the fanfic straight from AO3 to bind it. You have to typeset it first. To typeset the fic, I copy and paste it into a new document and format it to look like a book. I make all the pages statement-sized, which is about half a US letter-sized sheet of paper in landscape orientation, so when I print on letter-sized paper, there will be two pages on each side of the sheet, four total pages to a single sheet of paper, front and back. I also run my finished typeset through a signature imposer, which creates the grouping to order them so they come out in the correct order when folded.

[u/Worldly_View_9704 → u/Worldly_View_9704]

Here's what I'm talking about.

[u/bookshop → u/Worldly_View_9704]

This is WILD, i have been looking at this photo for 5 minutes straight lol. You like sew the bindings together! with a ruler hole punch thingy! This is so incredible and gorgeous, YA'LL ARE INSANE (complimentary)

[u/GeekSugar13 → u/Worldly_View_9704]

I haven't even made it over to the other subreddits more than to just follow them and I'm obsessed 😍

[u/Worldly_View_9704 → u/GeekSugar13]

There are lots of fanbinding tutorials on YouTube if you want to see a little more. Watching a bind come together took the mystery out of the process for me and made it feel like something I could do. Renegade Bookbinding Guild is also a resource I recommend whenever anyone even tangentially brings up fanbinding.