Old Computer Challenge, Day 7 (and Conclusions)
This was actually two sessions on two days. I had meant to do this as one but I goofed on copying the PDF off the T42 and ran out of spoons for the day. I decided to revisit this and finish this up as I feel it's dragging on a little too long and it's becoming less fun. I've put the instructions on how to fold the zine inline with my commentary.
Start by folding the printed page along the length. One one side the front cover should be at the bottom right, and page 6 should be at the bottom left.
Getting From PoC To Finished Project Is Hard
In my last OCC post I managed to print some test copies of the zine. This was enough to figure out where I was going wrong, but getting from here to done took a lot more effort and thought than I anticipated.
Fold the page halfway along the width, so pages 4, 5, 6 and 7 are on one side.
The first problem I encountered was with PDF generation. I don't know if it's Publisher, Distiller or the two PDF printing options and settings but sometimes the bottom of my pages would be cropped out. I figured out that how I print massively affects the output. I spent some more time on this and found some workarounds but even then it's not conclusive. In the end I went with the cropped look, mostly because the space lost is a footer and losing the space lets me make the pages bigger. I think something somewhere is possibly stuck in US Letter size and that might be affecting proportions, but to be honest I wanted to get this out of the door and done.
Now fold the front cover and page 2 in to the middle, and pages 8 and 5 from the other side into the middle. They should meet, not overlap (mine overlapped because my printer is janky af).
The second problem I encountered was with PDFJam, or rather the under-the-hood LaTeX used to create the single-page zine PDFs. Because the original PDF pages have margins each resulting zine page was much smaller than it needed to be. I started trimming but I think the 8-fold approach doesn't quite divide in A4 the way I'd like. In the end I went with a 1cm all round trim, which leaves a small margin at the inside edge. That'll do for this project but I'll probably spend more time looking at other tooling for future zines.
Fold it back over the width so the front and back cover, pages 2 and 3 will be all on one side. Now cut one (small) page length from the middle towards the edge.
The final problem (which I resolved) was that some of the font choices didn't print to PDF from Windows very well. These were TrueType Fonts but not in the standard Postscript font set. I was quite surprised it didn't work but then again, Windows 3.1 was the first to include TrueType support and Adobe Type Manager might not have been playing well. I changed the fonts to more readable ones and this worked fine.
Fold it back lengthways and you'll see the zine form a kind of diamond-shape.
The Final Zine and Next Steps
So after some rewriting I now have the finished zine content, and after some finagling I have the finished zines. You can download them from here in original flat PDF, 8-fold A4, and (hopefully) 8-fold US Letter formats. Unfortunately PDFJam (or rather the LaTeX pdfpages tool it uses) only lets you either specify a frame (for folding) or not at all which adds borders. I used the frame because the lines are quite useful for folding the zine.
I applied for a rhizome microgrant to clean up, document and publish my code as I don't feel comfortable sharing it as is. If the application is successful I'll spend some time cleaning up the zine code and will publish it online. If the application isn't successful I'll probably still do this at some point but it's going to the back of the project queue as I want to do other things before revisiting it.
Fold pages 5 and 6 over page 7, then the front cover and page 1 over the back. You should now have a zine! Happy reading!
OCC Thoughts and Conclusions
Of all the OCCs I've participated in, I'd say this was the most productive but least rewarding. I wrote a fair amount of code and learned a lot about PDF printing and Windows 3.11 in the process, probably more about Windows 3.11 and it's postscript capabilities than any person should really need to know. I actually made something, as opposed to playing with things and I'm quite happy with that.
Having said that debugging Windows 3.11 PDF printing from Publisher was a real grind, as was dealing with Windows 3.11 generally. I used to think Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 was kind of the baseline needed to do modern Office type work but I don't feel comfortable inflicting that on others. I'll definitely do OCC next year but with something different.
Having done enough Windows 3.11 for a while the T42 will now be used for Windows 98 through XP gaming. I've been playing old games I never got round to completing for a few years now and I'd quite like to have another run at Interstate '76 and Final Fantasy VII.