How a Pondr issue is made.
Trim, stock, binding, margins, typography, and the automated checks a run has to pass before it is printed. Published in full because the details are the product, and because they are useful to anyone else doing print-on-demand.
Trim and stock
| Trim size | 156 × 234 mm (6.14 × 9.21 in) — Royal |
|---|---|
| Binding | Perfect bound |
| Interior paper | 60# (approx. 90 gsm) white |
| Cover | Matte laminate, full colour |
| Interior | Full colour, standard |
| Bindable range | 32–800 interior pages, even count required |
| Bleed | 3 mm |
Royal is a compromise between column measure and hand feel: wide enough that a two-column layout does not produce cramped lines, narrow enough to hold open one-handed. Perfect binding gives a flat printed spine, so an issue can be shelved and found later — which is most of the point of printing it.
Margins and the gutter
Outer margins are fixed; the inside margin is not. A thicker book loses more of the inner page into the binding, so the gutter scales with page count. These values sit above the print partner's stated minimums rather than at them, because a run that is exactly at the minimum has no tolerance for binding drift.
| Top | 25 mm |
|---|---|
| Bottom | 22 mm |
| Outside | 14 mm |
| Gutter, ≤ 150 pp | 20 mm (4 mm above the 16 mm minimum) |
| Gutter, 151–400 pp | 25 mm |
| Gutter, 401–600 pp | 29 mm |
| Gutter, > 600 pp | 32 mm |
Margins are mirrored: the gutter is on the right of a verso page and the left of a recto page, so facing pages are symmetrical about the spine.
Typography
| Body | Spectral |
|---|---|
| Display | Cormorant Garamond |
| Interface and captions | Outfit |
| Monospace | JetBrains Mono |
All fonts are embedded. None of them is a system font that happens to be installed on the render host — an unembedded font is a preflight failure, not a warning.
Page count estimation
An edition is specified in reading time, so the page count has to be predicted before layout. The estimate runs at roughly 2.5 minutes of reading per page for the Royal two-column layout, plus about 8 pages of overhead for the cover, table of contents, colophon, and link notes. Because perfect binding needs paired leaves, an odd interior count is padded with a blank page rather than being sent as-is.
Preflight — what blocks a run
Every issue is checked automatically before a print order is placed. A failure on any of these stops the run. The gate is the check, not a person looking at a proof; a human only reviews what preflight flags or what a reader reports.
- No font fallbacks. Any font referenced but not embedded fails.
- Image resolution. 300 DPI at rendered size is the target; 150 DPI is a hard floor. Below the floor, the run stops.
- Orphans and widows within typographic spec.
- Table of contents page references must match actual page positions.
- Cover must render without overflow, with title and issue date present.
- Page count must be even and inside the binder's range.
The 150 DPI floor is a concession to reality rather than a preference. A 300 DPI hard minimum blocked essentially every real run, because images sourced from the open web are rarely that large. Targeting 300 and failing below 150 keeps the quality bar honest without making the product unable to print.
How the PDF is produced
Layout is deterministic: HTML and CSS rendered by WeasyPrint, not generated by a model. Article text is never rewritten, condensed, or "improved" on the way through — the transformation is typesetting, and nothing else.
Next: read a complete example issue, or see how an issue is assembled.