Lay-Flat Bookbinding Build Diary



Introduction
Content
Printing
Clamping
Gluing
The Cover
Gluing the Cover
Things to try


Links

Cornell notetaking system

Japanese five-point binding

Perfect binding

LaTeX

Texniccenter Latex IDE

GIMP Image program

Barcode Generator

Materials

Notebook TEX

Notebook PDF

GIMP Book Cover File

PDF Book Cover File



And of course, take a look at builddiary.net the page for all things excessive-hobby related.





Step 1 - Creating the content

I find that few bookbinding pages ever make any mention of the content that the person is binding, but in this case it is important to my project.

Although I found a few Cornell paper templates online, I decided to create my own template using LaTeX to create a PDF that I could print double sided. The lined side can be used for written notes, and the graph paper on the opposite side can be used for diagrams and drawings, as well as the occasional doodle and grid game.

I played with the idea that I would do two pages to a 8 1/2 by 11 page, but decided that having to slice the pages made it too complicated for my impatient mind. Besides, it is really is nice to have a full page to work with when writing notes at work.

The content here can be whatever else is worth binding. I think I would be fun to see people binding their thesis, or first novel, or your reference notes for your building project using this technique. One of my coworkers mentioned binding his sketches. The most important thing that was mentioned in my researches was that this is a good technique for binding "mid-sized" books.

Another cool and exciting application is Gutenburg Project texts. They have a huge collection of out of copyright and classic texts of all types. You could typeset your favorite books, and have a customized book collection, with custom covers for each book. The trouble with Gutenberg text is that all formatting is stripped from the test, but you can reformat it to HTML or LaTeX using the interesting GutenMark converter.

I am also thinking about printing a LaTeX manual, and a GIMP manual, and binding those, too.