Zine Creator

Printer settings for duplex zines

Getting double-sided printing right is the trickiest part of making a zine at home. The print dialog has a lot of knobs and most of them are named differently across drivers, but only a handful really matter. This page covers what to set, how to fix the common problems, and the few less-obvious settings that quietly ruin a print run if they're wrong. For hardware choice see the printer guide, and for what to load into the tray see the paper guide.

The settings to use

Long edge vs short edge

Edge-flip is purely about how the paper turns between side 1 and side 2 - not about where the spine of the booklet ends up (the spine of a half-fold zine is always down the long axis of landscape paper). The setting controls whether the driver expects you to flip the sheet around its long edge (like turning a book page) or its short edge (like flipping a calendar page), and whether the back side needs to be pre-rotated 180° to come out the right way up.

Zine Creator generates a long-edge layout by default, with the back side pre-rotated. If your back pages print upside down after folding, the driver is interpreting "long" and "short" the opposite way from the spec - switch Edge flip in Zine Creator to Short edge, re-download, and try one sheet. Faster than fighting the driver.

The half-fold zine guide goes into more depth on why long-edge is also the better choice when you're feeding the paper through manually.

If pages are in the wrong order

Usually this means the sheet stack got reversed when feeding or stacking. Sheet 1 (which carries page 1 and the back cover) should end up on top of the printed stack before folding. If your printer outputs face-up, the last printed sheet ends up on top of the output tray - so the stack is already reversed when you pick it up. Flip the whole stack before folding, or check whether your driver has a "Reverse order" option that does it for you.

Manual duplex (no auto-duplex printer)

If your printer can't do automatic duplex, you can still print zines by feeding the paper through twice. The general approach:

  1. Print only the front (odd) output pages first. Most print dialogs have an "Odd pages only" option.
  2. Take the stack out of the output tray. Flip it along the long edge - front becomes back, top becomes bottom.
  3. Put the stack back into the input tray. Test the orientation with one sheet before committing.
  4. Print the back (even) pages, in reverse order if your printer outputs face-up so the stack ends up correctly collated.

Flipping along the long edge (and not the short edge) matters for registration: it keeps the same short edge of the paper entering the rollers first on both passes. The feed mechanism grabs the same edge twice, so the second side lands in the same position as the first. Flipping along the short edge swaps which edge feeds first, and any tolerance in the rollers shows up as a small left-right shift between the two sides - subtle but visible at the fold.

Many drivers have a "manual duplex" mode that walks you through this and prompts when to flip. Worth using if available.

Media type

This is the most underrated setting in the print dialog. The Media type (also called Paper type) dropdown tells the printer what kind of paper it's about to draw onto, and the driver uses that to decide:

If the driver thinks it's printing on plain paper but you've loaded 120 gsm inkjet-optimized stock, the result is under-inked and the colors look muted. If the driver thinks it's photo paper but you've loaded plain copy paper, you'll over-soak the sheet, warp it, and bleed through to the other side. Picking a media type that matches the paper in the tray is a five-second adjustment with an outsized effect on the finished zine.

See the paper guide for what the paper labels mean; the matching media-type label is usually obvious once you know whether the paper is plain, inkjet-optimized (ColorLok / "color enhanced" / etc.), or coated.

Quality and color management

Most drivers expose two related knobs:

Bleeds and full-page graphics

If your design extends to the edge of the page, set a small Margin in Zine Creator (e.g. 3-5 mm) so the cut marks fall in a printable area. Most home printers reserve a 5-10 mm border they physically cannot print into - "borderless" is a marketing term and usually means the printer actually upscales the content slightly to cover the edge, which crops it.

Borderless mode also drifts sheet to sheet. Because the upscaling is applied per sheet at print time and the paper feed has small mechanical tolerances, the content position can shift slightly between consecutive sheets in the same job. When you stack and fold the finished sheets, the fold creases will not line up perfectly across all pages, and the booklet feels visibly uneven at the spine. This is one of the reasons many zinemakers prefer to print with a small margin rather than borderless: the small margin lines up consistently while a borderless edge does not.

If you want a true edge-to-edge print, the cleanest approach is to print on oversized paper (A3 for an A5 zine), then trim down to the cut marks after binding. That keeps the printed content in a consistent position and you get the edge-to-edge look from the trim rather than from the printer. A paper trimmer makes this workflow fast enough to be practical for batches.

Drying time and handling (inkjet)

Fresh inkjet prints, especially on full-color pages, are not dry the moment they hit the output tray. If you stack hot prints face-down on top of each other, ink can transfer to the back of the next sheet - you'll see ghost marks where dark areas pressed against the page below. The same applies if you fold immediately after printing: the inside of the fold mashes wet ink across itself.

The fix is the obvious one: lay the printed sheets flat for a few minutes before stacking, folding, or stapling. Five minutes is usually enough on standard 100 gsm paper at Standard quality; longer at High quality, on heavier stock, or with dye-heavy color (see the printer guide on ink chemistries for why pigment dries faster than dye).

Before a long run: test print and save the preset

Two small habits save a lot of paper and ink on bigger zine batches:

If quality drops mid-run

Banding, missing horizontal lines, faded colors, or unexpected color casts mean the print head needs attention. Every home inkjet driver has a maintenance menu with at least two relevant items:

On tank printers especially, running a nozzle check before a long zine print is a five-minute habit that prevents discovering a half-clogged nozzle ten sheets into the job.