Printing a zine at a copy shop vs at home: what to ask for

Copy shops print thousands of documents a day and their defaults are set for documents, not zines: scale to fit, double-sided, portrait. Say the settings out loud or write them on a note with the file. For an 8-page zine: “Print at 100 percent, actual size, no scaling. Single-sided. Landscape. On 100 to 120 gsm if you have it.” For a booklet: “Print at 100 percent, double-sided, flip on the short edge, collate on; the pages are already in booklet order, please do not use booklet mode.”

Bring the print PDF on a USB stick or email it ahead; Foldpic's print PDF is already the sheet size you chose, so there is nothing to adjust. Then ask for one sheet first. Check it against the page numbers in the instruction sheet and, for booklets, hold it to the light. Only then run the batch. Almost every bad copy-shop zine comes from a scaling default or booklet mode applied on top of an already imposed file.

Prices vary a lot by country and shop, so treat these as a typical range rather than a quote. A colour A4 or Letter side at a high-street copy shop is commonly somewhere between $0.15 and $0.60; black and white is a fraction of that. An 8-page zine is one side, so fifty copies is fifty sides. Heavier paper adds a little, and some shops charge a small setup fee for a job from a USB stick. University and library print rooms are often cheaper.

For a booklet of four sheets printed both sides, each copy is eight sides. Ten copies is eighty sides, which is where the copy shop's speed starts to matter more than the price.

Home wins for one to five copies, for proofing, and for photo work where you want to control the paper. Your own inkjet on matte photo paper will usually beat a copy shop's laser on plain paper for photographs. Print the Foldpic test page once to confirm scale and margins, then print. Ink cost for a full-colour A4 side is roughly $0.10 to $0.40 depending on the printer and cartridges, typical and varies, so a single zine costs pennies.

Home loses on speed for big runs, on heavy card if your printer will not feed it, and on A3 or Tabloid if you only have an A4 printer. In that case the sensible split is to proof at home and take the final PDF to the shop.

Whether the sheets come from the shop or your printer, the folding is the same and it is the slow part of a batch. Set up a table, fold all the sheets in half the long way first, then all in quarters, then cut all the slits, then collapse each one. Doing each step for the whole stack is much faster than finishing one zine at a time, and a ruler or bone folder for the creases stops your thumb hurting after twenty.