On the edge: printing zine margins May 2, 2025 • Amanda Wyatt Visconti Q. Do you know of zine templates that let you import your zine content and then print it properly? A. I’ve run into this a lot, partly bc some printers have various hidden amounts of white space they’ll require to allow for where they grip the paper, even if you set printer settings to zero margins. Very frustrating, especially for printing minizines, where this can through off what’s visible per page when you fold the pages. A few printers have true borderless printing, but I haven’t happened to run into one at home/work yet. Sometimes I use a paper cutter or scissors to remove that unprinted edge after printing, to make the zine look printed all the way to the edge when it doesn’t have a white background. Researching what those secret extra whitespace settings are for my particular printer brand and model has helped, as well as printing a test template with text running off all the zine page edges. This lets me then measure on the printout what of the text gets cut off, then design so my text/images don’t go there. In Canva, I’ve drawn those measured cutoff points as colored boxes, then duplicate that page to fill it with zine content and remove the boxes once I’m ready to print, like so: Canva (free plan) lets you set margin and bleed guides (file > settings) that helps with designing for printing correctly. While these don’t override that secret won’t-print-there grip area of paper many printers have, ustom print margin settings can sometimes help too: I’ve tried various zine arranger (plus additional cool features!) tools, such as: Zine Arranger Electric Zine Maker Spectrolite This GDoc template, made by Reddit user ttuulliipp These all do useful things, but ultimately can’t address different printers adding that secret extra space—so the hacks above have worked best for me. From text originally posted by me via the Scholars’ Lab Bluesky account in response to a question there. Cite this post: Visconti, Amanda Wyatt. “On the edge: printing zine margins”. Published May 02, 2025 on the Literature Geek research blog. https://literaturegeek.com/2025-05-02-on-the-edge-printing-zine-margins. Accessed on .