## The Poem

I had been aware of ["Desiderata"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata) for over two decades but didn’t appreciate its wisdom and how calming it could be for me until around 2017.  Soon after realizing this I wanted to get it into a form that was easy to transport and access, e.g. in a pocket of one’s trousers or jacket.


## The Minibook

Coincidentally, around the same time I found the concept of a "minibook", which I found out now may also be called "fold-a-book", or "zine" which is a method of folding an [A4 paper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216#A_series) into a little booklet with 8 pages and the format A7, requiring only one cut.  See the references at the bottom for guides on this.

Big thanks go to Richard Schuetz for adapting the "8 on 1" layout of [`pgfpages`](https://tikz.dev/pages) to put the pages in the correct order.


## The Combination

Combining these two things I ended up with a little Desiderata booklet which comfortable fits into any pocket or bag that I can easily reproduce myself.  And of course a generic latex template for this kind of booklet to use for other things.


## The Results

You can find the resulting PDF for printing and folding yourself here:

* English version: [desiderata_minibook.pdf](/files/desiderata_minibook.pdf)
* German version: [desiderata_minibook_de.pdf](/files/desiderata_minibook_de.pdf)

The LaTeX source can be found on <https://git.netwichtig.ch/cgit/user/henk/docs/latex/desiderata_minibook.git/>.


## References

I don’t recall where I first found the concept of the "minibook" but here is a list of documents about it:

* <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Zine_Making/Putting_pages_together>
* <https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/how%20to%20fold%20a%20zine.pdf>
* <https://www.minibooks.ch/> (german)