PagePacker is a macOS application that helps you build little pocket sized notebooks and physical zines from a single page of paper.
Don't want to compile it yourself? You can purchase the app directly at therohans.com/pagepacker/.
PagePacker was written in the early 2000s It was originally created by Big Nerd Ranch and written by Aaron Hillegass. Original Post
I found the application quite useful, for on-the-go notes and making little pocket zines for local meetups and conference pamphlets.
Here is what the application looks like:
Folding instructions:
PagePacker is AppleScript-scriptable, so this repo includes a Claude Code
skill (.claude/skills/zine/) that turns an HTML report, PDF, or research topic
into a little 8-panel pocket zine and assembles it in PagePacker for you.
You don't need to check out this repo's source to use it — just PagePacker itself installed (from therohans.com/pagepacker/ or wherever you got it) and the skill folder pulled down on its own:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/zine
curl -sL https://github.com/robrohan/PagePacker/archive/refs/heads/master.tar.gz \
| tar -xz -C ~/.claude/skills/zine --strip-components=4 PagePacker-master/.claude/skills/zineThat pulls just the skill's files (no Xcode project, no templates, nothing else
from the source tree) straight into ~/.claude/skills/zine, so it's available in
any project you use Claude Code in. If you'd rather it only apply to one project,
change the -C target above to that project's .claude/skills/zine instead.
Once it's there, just ask Claude Code something like "use the zine skill to make a pocket zine from this article" and it'll take it from there.
When I went looking for the application, it seems it had fallen into the void of the internet.
Luckily, Aaron open sourced the application back in 2007:
Aaron Hillegass November 5, 2007 | Mac I am celebrating the arrival of Mac OS X 10.5 by making the source code to PagePacker available. Here is the compiled application.
With a bit of digging around I've found the original application source, and tried to updated it to the latest version of macOS (Tahoe os26 as of this writing).
This was written by Aaron Hillegass who taught Cocoa programming at Big Nerd Ranch, Inc. (a now non-existent company).
To write the app was Nate Osborne's idea. He was inspired by PocketMod. See http://www.pocketmod.com/ for details.
The original templates were released under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license so they have been removed from the binary release, but can be found in the Non-Free directory if you are looking for the originals.
Matt Neuberg made PagePacker AppleScriptable.
The icon was created by Kyle Mistry: http://kylepoint.com/
The Japanese localization was done by Joshua Done.
This software and its source code are released by Big Nerd Ranch, Inc. under the BSD License.