PagePacker — Fold Your Own Pocket Notebooks | The Rohans on The Rohans

Automating PagePacker with AppleScript | The Rohans

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

macOS · automation

Automating PagePacker with AppleScript

PagePacker has been scriptable since Matt Neuberg, one of the people who wrote the book on AppleScript, added the dictionary to it. Here's how to actually use that.

Why script a notebook maker

Dragging eight pages into place by hand is fine for one notebook. It stops being fine the moment you need thirty: a teacher prepping a week of foldable worksheets for every class, or someone converting a folder of scanned zine pages into a stack of print-ready sheets. That's exactly the kind of repetitive job AppleScript exists to kill.

How to Fold Your Own Pocket Notebook From One Sheet of Paper | The Rohans

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paper · DIY

Fold Your Own Pocket Notebook

No app, no printer setup, no PagePacker required for this one. Just a sheet of paper, scissors, and about a minute.

What you need

One sheet of paper (letter, A4, whatever you've got) and a pair of scissors. That's the entire materials list.

Fold it down to eighths Fold the sheet in half hot-dog style, the long way. Without unfolding, fold it in half hamburger style. Fold hamburger style one more time. You should now be holding a small folded rectangle, folded into eighths.
Unfold, then make one fold Open the sheet all the way back out flat. Now fold it in half just once, hamburger style.
Make the cut With the paper still folded in half, cut along the center crease starting from the folded edge, stopping at the halfway point. You're cutting a slit into the middle of the folded sheet, not cutting it in two.
Unfold flat again Open the sheet all the way. There's now a slit running through the center of the paper, with both outer edges still fully intact.
Fold it into a book Fold the sheet in half hot-dog style. Hold one end in each hand and push them toward each other. The slit in the middle will pop open into a diamond shape. Keep pushing until the panels fold together, then press it flat into a small booklet.

If it folds into a plus-shaped mess instead of a neat stack, the cut usually wasn't centered, or it went a little too far past the halfway mark. Unfold it flat and check the slit before trying again.

Once you've got the fold down

This is the entire trick behind every pocket notebook, zine, and PocketMod planner that's ever been folded from one sheet. Once your hands know it, you can make one in the time it takes to explain it to someone else.

What Is a Pocket Notebook?

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paper · DIY

What Is a Pocket Notebook?

One sheet of paper, one cut, and you're holding an eight-page book. Here's how the fold actually works and why people still bother making their own.

The short version

A pocket notebook, in the sense people mean when they talk about "folding your own," is a small book made from a single sheet of paper: no stapler, no glue, no binding. Fold it the right way, make one straight cut, and it opens up into eight small pages you can write, draw, or print on.

Zines, GTD, and the Hipster PDA

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paper · history

Zines, GTD, and the Hipster PDA

Punk publishers in the 70s and productivity bloggers in the 2000s never had much to say to each other, but they landed on the exact same folded sheet of paper for the exact same reasons.

It starts with zines

Zines have been the domain of punks, sci-fi obsessives, and anyone with something to say and no patience for waiting on a publisher since the 1970s. Punk Globe, one of the earliest and most cited punk zines, was distributed as photocopied pages folded together starting in 1977. The riot grrrl movement of the early 90s ran on the same production method: a copy shop, a stapler if you had one, and hand-to-hand distribution at shows.