ZonBoards

Hi hi, making this thread to help gather resources and lessons learned for printing so that people don't have to misprint on a bunch of paper! My experience with printing booklets with Affinity Publisher 2 (2026-03). This guide is more targets towards making your own zine, but you can jump straight to printing if you've acquired a PDF that you want to print.

--- Setup ---
The important part of printing with affinity is that pages are designed and set up as singular pages which can then be made as layouts, rather than trying to design 2 pages at once on a landscape page. This is done in the Document setup (File -> Document Setup). If you're planning to print on letter, make a custom 5.5 x 8.5 page layout and apply it to the document and set the Spread dimensions to a landscape letter.

--- Printing! ---
I use a Home laser printer that only prints one-sided that I picked up many years ago.

• First, make sure to set printing model to booklet, and with doublesided. This will automatically arrange the pages for you into a booklet layout.
• Next, set the double-sided option to: flip on short side. This will allow you to simply feed the printed pages back into the printer. (At least this is how it works on mine)
• Finally, if you're using a different type of paper for the cover, make sure to select the "Reverse" Option. This lets you put the cover page as the first page printed. Otherwise, the cover needs to be the last page in the stack.

Note: I would always suggest trying to print your booklet with 8 pages (2 sheets, front and back) before ripping off the whole thing. That way if there there are errors, you will be able to catch them before wasting a ton of paper.

Another Note: Your prints will ALWAYS have a slight, non-printed border to them. This is because printers need to feed the paper. If you want a background to fully reach the page edge, you will need to trim the printed sheets.

If you're using a different type of paper for cover (i.e. card stock, colored paper), you may need to manually hold down the second sheet to stop it from getting dragged through by friction. This needs to be done for both sides of printing. Doing so is easy for me because my printer is front loading rather than having a paper tray that needs to be shut.

Great tips! Thanks for the post.

Some tidbits I will add on that always confused me;

As Twopercentwilk mentioned above, some printers are "duplex" printers and some are single sided only. Nowadays, most printer scanner combos are Duplex printers. (you can tell because they are more of a cube than a flatter machine) All Duplex means is that the printer will flip the paper for you. this is just another name for double sided printing, but many printing dialogue boxes will label this as Duplex instead, and it always tripped me up.

If you have a more specialized Photo Printer, they can print larger sheets of paper (mine goes up to 14 x 18in) but most of the time they are only Single Sided printers. If you happen to have a printer like this, in the printer dialogue box you may need to choose Evens only, print it all out. Then take the paper out, flip it over, and put it right back into the printer to print the Odds. This will give you double sided printing in a more round-about way.

Most libraries and printing stores will all have duplex printers, just make sure to choose double sided printing.

Another term that screwed me up is Collate. Collating is when the printer prints booklets in order when printing a large quantity. Say you wanted to print 3 Zines, and you choose Collate in the printer dialogue, the printer would print Zine 1, Zine 2, and then Zine 3 sequentially. Without collating, the printer would print all three page 1s, all three page 2s, all three page 3s, and so on. If you do large sets of zines at one time, collating is a big time saver.

More on my foray into home printing.

The printer that I use is an HP-M29w laser printer. It comes with very few frills, but has a digital scanner and can handle a nice variety of paper sizes and weights (up to 8.5x14). I originally picked it up when I was working at a field station and needed to print out data sheets on water resistant paper. Of course, ink won't work on paper that has a coating to reduce absorption. Photocopiers and laser printers work by heating up the toner (which is a powder), and pressing it on to the paper.

However, it's still a cheap printer. Functional, but finnicky. When I didn't know which options to select for a particular print run some parts didn't come out right. The paper was more prone to curling and getting caught up. When it reported that the toner was low, sometimes that just meant "shake the cartridge a bit to redistribute." Here are some of the questions/problems I dealt with.

"How do I print double sided?"

This is covered in the first post of the thread and Zon gave some additional tips above.

"Why is the toner rubbing off of my cover and nowhere else? Why did someone call it 'flaking' when it's just coming off as a powder?"

Flaking is a general term for when the toner isn't properly bonded to the paper it is being applied to. More often than not, this occurs because there is a mismatch in the printer properties and the paper being used. To adjust this, I had to figure out the weight of my paper and adjust it in the printer properties. This also meant that I oped to print off a fair number of covers at once with the proper weight. Then, I just had to readjust the printer properties and rip off copies of the zine interior.

"Printer properties? I thought I had all my options when printing straight from affinity?"

I thought that with all the printing options available through affinity, I had all the options available right there. WRONG. Affinity, and other software, gave me print options that determine what content makes it into the printable area and in what order. This includes whether bleed (more on this later) is included in the print area, how the digital pages are arranged physically, what order they are printed in (very helpful for manual, double-sided printing), and how multiple copies are collated.

Printer properties ALSO have some of these options. Landscape vs portrait, what edge is flipped for double sided printing, and very notably: paper weight.

I'm not sure exactly how similar options from different sources (orientation from printer properties and orientation from software) combine. It could be software override, it could be the combination of the two where selecting reverse in each makes it print "normally." Tests for another time when I have paper and toner to spare.

From someone who has only ever used Ink-jet, what are the benefits you find from using toner printers?

You touched on water proof paper, which I had no idea you could do, but I honestly never even thought about getting a toner printer. Is it cheaper? Easier? Would love your thoughts, even if the answer is just "Its what I had."!

It definitely started out as "what I had" lol, I bought it for very practical purposes and then just really enjoyed the "office copier" look that it imparted. I think it can be cheaper than some ink printers? I think that B&W toner is similar cost to tank-based ink printers, both being cheaper than printers that use cartridges. I think that it comes close to $0.003 per page. Finally, it prints pretty fast which is nice! I'm curious about getting a color laserjet at some point, but the colors will certainly be more muted than an inkjet.

Yeah, Inkjet benefits are definitely color reproduction (although sometimes they can come out MUCH darker than intended) and I think you can get much larger print areas, like with the big photo printers.

Though if you are buying $5 printers from goodwill as I do, theres a great chance that the heads will dry up and you have to soak them in water and do a bunch of nonsense to get them moving and grooving again.

If you are handy, buying 10 $5 printers (just only get the same one so you have lots of the same parts) I think is still a great deal! I had bought 4 of the same one, two bit the dust in various ways and I kept their print heads (decapitated??!) in case the other ones go. A print head can be anywhere from 10-100$, so its honestly way cheaper to just buy another used printer at that point.

My current printers are a large format Canon Pixma iX6520 (can print up to 13x19) which I use to print borderless covers for the games.

and a Canon Pixma TR7520. Highly recommend this one. Easy to buy at a thrift, ink is cheap (buy on ebay or online, off brand ink works) and its a duplex machine, with a scanner. It has a normal print size but its so reliable I'd go for this one anyday.

Good to know! I'll have to consider adding some element of ink to my next zine project, and maybe make sure it's a duplex printer, lol. Printing single sided only can be a bit of a pain.

A little write up on how to do upkeep on ink printer heads would be really really interesting!