Don't go running off to print the phone book until you've read this!

A few people have asked about a print edition of the Kripke phone book, and while I agree that a physical edition would be cool, it’s a little beyond my budget/competence at the moment.

“Well, what about a print-at-home version of the PDF?” you ask. Good question. For a number of reasons, printing out a phone book can be a little tricky. The biggest is, well, size. This is a 72-page book, and stapling together a digest format zine gets pretty awkward around the 40-page mark.

Nevertheless… I have reformatted the phone book into an edition that is, in principle, printable. So if you want to give it a try, go ahead and grab the “print-at-home” edition. I do, however, have a few recommendations:

• Do not use standard printer paper for the interior pages. You can use card stock for the cover if you want, but if you want the book to fold and accept a staple, you’ll probably want to use something much lighter than the typical 20 lb. weight of most printer paper. Go as lightweight as your printer can handle.

• Make sure you’ve got enough ink or toner for the job. I’ve toned down the darkness, but you’re still looking at printing about 68 pages of densely set text.

• For the love of God, print at least one test page first. In particular, you’ll want to make sure that the margins are okay.

I haven’t made a test print, so no guarantees. If you make a good print, let us know in the comments, and tell us if doing anything differently helped with the results.

Here’s a list of changes I made to produce the print-at-home edition:

• All textures have been removed.
• All elements have been changed to grayscale.
• The brightness of most elements has been increased to reduce bleed-thru when printing on lightweight paper.
• Some dark shape elements have been changed to white to save on ink/toner.
• The name range section of page headers has been replaced with a number range. This reduces the verisimilitude, but it should make looking up a rolled name easier, which isn’t really an issue on digital devices where you can just search the number.
• The entire book has been exported as pages, rather than spreads.