I'm contemplating getting a PDF and printing it out. A test run at the office depot site showed me how little I know about the printing and binding process. I know we've got at least one or two guys in the printing business here. Could someone give a bruvva a little hep?

The paper options are many, with the default being 100% cotton. Binding can be either coil, comb, stapling, or tape. I can guess at what the binding options mean but I have no idea which one would be better.

My .02Y

Binding types:

spiral is rather like a 'spiral notebook' with the paper being bound in to a single wire or plastic spiral, it looks pretty good, but is probably not the best choice for thick or high durability documents. Another plus for spiral binding is that the documents will 'wrap around' so the document can lie open showing just a single page.

Comb is the pretty standard 'black plastic' binding you've probably seen on a lot of business documents. The comb bindings seem to be reasonable durable, but they won't wrap around like spiral bindings will.

Tape bindings these usually 'glued edge' type binding, they are generally for short term durability presentation thingies, not for gaming books.

Staple bindings: Basically stapled through in the middle and folded over. Plenty of early gaming books are staple bound. They actually hold up reasonably well (much better than glue bindings, imho) but they are only good for short documents (maybe 100 pages in total or less). You just have to watch out for pages coming out in the middle. (If you had the early boxed set DnD books, they were staple bound. Some 'fancy' staple bindings you a bit more than an industrial office staples, and instead use a sort of multi toothed staple that goes the whole length of the document instead.

cotton paper is much more expensive that wood pulp paper, it is also more durable and tear resistant. However it costs 10x as much or more than regular paper.

Printing whole (main) gaming books is sort of tricky, since they tend to much better than normal bindings.

If you really want the whole hog, you want each page individually laminated and the whole thing in a ring binder (so that you can take important pages out for reference). The lamination also protects from coke, greasy fingers, etc. It can make the book hard to read, because of the shininess. (You can describe it as 'something like a mechanic's reference manual' to the printer.)

For something less costly, spiral or comb bound with high quality wood pulp paper is where you want to go. This will generally not stand up to handling as well as a normal gaming book though. (except for those gaming books whose bindings as typically fail as soon as you get them home.)

Thanks! It's a 148 page book, so stapling is out of the question. I'll probably go with comb and cotton for durability. If I could just buy the thing in hard copy that'd be better, but it's an out of print spacemaster book that didn't have a large print run to begin with so it goes for about $30 in crappy condition. I can get the pdf and printout for about $18, and have a soft copy and hard copy.