Printer Test
Wednesday, October 11th, 2023 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
60F and sunny out there this morning. We could get a little rain tonight, and the outlook still says more rainy days than not over the next week.
Last night I finally began to grapple with the issues of actually printing this house history I've been working on for years.
In it's current state, if printed single sided, it would be some 200 pages, and an inch thick!
So I need to get the printer down here to do some tests and see if I can get the font smaller, or see how hard it is to do double sided.
There'd also be a hell of a lot of three-hole punching.
Hrmmm... do copy places still exist and do that stuff for you?
Okay... it looks like my best bet is to buy a comb binder for $35 bucks, and some 1" diameter combs, or bigger.
I'd still have to punch each sheet individually, but it'd be less hassle than with a three hole punch.
I could get black, leather texture, cardstock for covers for twenty bucks.
Started raining around 6:30PM and hasn't stopped.
It's gotten lighter and heavier from time to time, but... hasn't stopped, and it's supposed to go all night.
I went ahead and ordered a comb binding machine, 1.5" comb spines, faux leather card stock: black, 3 reams of copy paper, and some label holders that stick to the spines.
Then when I got home, I brought the printer down here, with some paper and started doing tests to see how WordPad and my printer deal with double-sided printing.
It was a little confusing for a while, but I figured it out!
Basically it just prints one side of everything in the batch first... then you flip the whole thing over... stick it back in... and it does the back sides.
And in draft mode, it's pretty readable, and damn fast! I may go with regular quality, but... "best" quality is not needed and would be too slow.
So double sided, we're talking 100 to 110 sheets of paper per booklet. So that's much more manageable.
I already made sure a long time ago to include only black and white illustrations, so as not to use up my color ink.
And because the illustrations tend to throw off the flow, I figured out how to add page breaks.
Basically, you just open the RTF document in a text editor, where you can see the markup code and add, "/page" where you want to force a break.
I'm using WordPad for all of this because I refuse to pay a subscription fee for MS Word!
The font size is readable in print. I don't want to go any smaller.
And I do want page numbers in the chapters... both to make it easier to get them back together if they get mixed up... and because if you don't have page numbers, the printer will tend to lose the last line of text on a page.
So... proof of concept.
Now the challenge is to finish updating Chapters 9 and 10 (it's only 10 chapters) and see if I cant get six of these things together before everybody gets here.
If I can't get it done by next week, then I'll shoot for December and send them out for Christmas... to my five siblings... with one for myself.
But it is good to finally be pushing myself with a deadline on this, because I've been working on, "Volume 1: 1856 - 1956" for almost six years!
°¦}
