I’ve used an industrial paper cutter before and it’s one of the most satisfying machines I’ve ever seen. Just imagine the sound of a blade slicing cleanly through several hundred sheets of paper. The thing had lasers and two buttons you had to press at once to operate it because it wouldn’t even care if your hand was in the way.

But everything was manually aligned by hand. Instead it could be a metal plate holding everything in place (maybe open on the scrap side to account for the width of the blade). I’d think that could give consistent results, but hard to say for sure how everything would move.

That plant also had die cutting machines that cut each page individually. I was just a temp worker there, so didn’t really get that far into the depth of the technology and what it could do. Most of the work I did there was pounding out the scrap parts from die-cut packages, which was also pretty satisfying, we’d use a rubber mallet to do a few hundred pages at once. Thinking back, I think that was one of my favourite jobs, especially because there were so few fucks to give.