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:

Screenshot of a Canva page where I've marked with green, yellow, and red rectangles where the various margins are on a page (margin, bleed, actual printer cutoff where it won't print beyond) if I mke a zine on it and print it with my particular printer.

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:

Screenshot of where to go in Adobe Acrobat to set custom printing margin settings: "page setup" button, then "paper size" to "Manage custom sizes..."

Screenshot of where to go in Adobe Acrobat to set custom printing margin settings: + icon, then set "Margins" as "User Defined" and enter 0 in. under the fields for each of the 4 sides of the paper

I’ve tried various zine arranger (plus additional cool features!) tools, such as:

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.