Print edition: plan + press route + A5 PDF export (ISSUE 375 debut)

[isaacsight]

Give the magazine a body

The publication was print-native from the first commit — POPEYE spine, the stock / monument / colophon / postmark vocabulary, one tomato spot color — but had never existed as a physical object. This is the first move to put kernel.chat on paper, carrying ISSUE 392's thesis (the hand survives) into the object itself.

What's here

1. The plan — docs/print-edition.md

• Debut object: ISSUE 375 — THE SIX BORROWS (cream anchor stock, monument-hero number as cover art, the credit-page issue — the right statement piece for issue Welcome to does-this-feel-right- Discussions! #1).
• Why risograph is the uncanny match: the whole brand is one spot color on warm uncoated stock, which is riso's native, cheapest mode (tomato ≈ Riso Bright Red / Fluorescent Orange).
• A5 saddle-stitch, 16pp, EB Garamond + Courier Prime + Noto Serif JP (all OFL-licensed for print). Full 16pp page plan for 375, production path, named riso/newsprint printers, Big Cartel/Gumroad sell plan + budget math, 8-week timeline.

2. The press route — src/pages/PrintIssuePage.tsx + .css

• New route #/issues/:number/print. Reuses IssueCover / IssueContents / IssueFeature / IssueCredits / IssueColophon minus every web-only chrome layer (no archive nav).
• A5 @page geometry, page breaks between blocks, print-color-adjust: exact so the warm stock + tomato spot actually render on press, plus a screen preview mode that shows page boundaries.

3. The export tool — tools/print-issue.ts + npm run print

• npm run build && npm run print 375 → print/375.pdf.
• Spawns vite preview, renders the print route in headless Chromium (Playwright, already a dependency), emits an A5 PDF with backgrounds preserved. Reusable for every issue.

Verification

• My files are type-clean. npx tsc --noEmit reports only pre-existing tsconfig deprecation warnings (esModuleInterop / moduleResolution / baseUrl) from a newer TypeScript in the build container — tsconfig.json is untouched.
• The PDF render itself could not run in this container (no Chromium binary); it runs locally where Playwright's browser is installed.

Next (not in this PR)

• Visual pass on the print CSS against a rendered proof — screen sections are viewport-sized, not 148mm pages, so the page model is in place but geometry needs tuning.
• Pre-flight: font embedding, spot-color separation, 3mm bleed.
• Printer quote + proof copy.

https://claude.ai/code/session_013H9jXskD9pThoBLdSxV2bG

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