Ewrick's Rabbit Hole

Wisp — volume 2 / front cover

After having pub­lished with much sat­is­faction a few books¹ with Lulu (one of the main actors in the print-on-demand ser­vices) this post is listing some of the things that may be useful to know (or to remember after a bit of trial and errors) to design a source file that will produce the perfect PDF file.

Black and white prints

Not much to say here, the quality was correct, and the first PDF I created went without any problem.

Colour prints

A bit more of a headache at first. The PDF pro­duced for the book(s) had intricate layouts, and when pro­duced according to the spec­i­fi­ca­tions (full embedding of the fonts, flat­tening of all trans­parencies etc.) it failed to RIP properly.

Thanks to the Pitstop Pro trial version, I was able to see what the Lulu contact indi­cated me, that some of the con­tents were going off the printable bound­aries of the pages.

Then I pro­ceeded to slice all of the stuff that I had allowed to go out of the pages without paying too much attention (in the past, I’ve worked with printers who never had any skir­mishes printing files created that way, but I figure this was not the case with Lulu’s printers).

Later, I dis­covered that this hap­pened when cre­ating the PDF, due to the bleed set­tings in facing page mode, when you export each page indi­vid­ually, some of the parts bleeding on the next page were not nec­es­sarily properly cropped; most of the times they are just copied, and “hidden”.

In fact, I figured out that even though working with the bleeding set­tings was very con­ve­nient (to flip between the final page preview and the working page), it’s a real pain when it comes to exporting the pages pro­duced that way. Why? because when you work in facing pages, the interior bleed (of say the even page) takes into account the page next to it (the odd one) –while you don’t really care, because these parts usually fall in the gutter. So you never can guess how the export will crop your page (esp. if you get vector art or text inter­secting those).

So, a few things to make sure it sim­plifies the cre­ation of your PDF for Lulu:

• don’t use the bleed set­tings: put the bleed to zero, and for full-bleed, extend the page’s size to the desired dimen­sions: for instance, for a US letter (8.5“x11”) format, your working file will be 8.75“x11.25″. You can adjust the bleed markers by using the grid and guides.
• When you compose the file, make sure your back­grounds, images, and esp. vectors and texts do not extend outside of the page. If need be, do not rely on the program to crop it for you at the export if you think reducing the box’s bound­aries will be enough. Most of the times, even with the cropping option acti­vated, it doesn’t work that nicely on the exported PDF.

But this was not all; after resub­mitting a revision of my PDF, it still wouldn’t work. Various reasons were invoked (fonts embedding, too many colors spaces, or ICC pro­files) but as far as the pre­flight was telling me, every­thing seemed nice and Adobe 5.0 (PDF 1.4) compatible…

So, another reason was invoked; that some areas where more than 600 dpi and clut­tered the print job… Okay, I go check and yes, some areas where the trans­parencies flat­tener had been over-zealous were a little above 600 dpi. I adjusted the PDF to no avail.

So, finally, I decided to redo the file by exporting most of the complex back­grounds to EPS (without the texts), checking the vectors, and exporting them to TIFF at 300 dpi, and reim­porting them in my file.

I took care of getting rid of the trans­parencies (in InDesign) which are con­ve­nient, but wreck havoc on the PDF. Going to plain simple PDF, like in the dark times of good old un-fancy Quark Xpress.

This process finally made the PDF printable, and I figured out that the mys­te­rious “Text won’t RIP” message I kept getting from the printer was probably due to those multiply/drop shadow transparencies/effects in InDesign. Because checking with the pre­flight the PDF the option “text used as clipping path” gave a few warnings in the initial files for all the texts using the fancy effects. They had dis­ap­peared in the simpler version.

To this date, there still seems to be a little issue with the printer’s way of cutting the pages… To be checked.
[Note from 2008/11/17: after a re-order was made, the quality was far better, and the page trimming was what it was sup­posed to be; I suppose the first shot was just messy as these things can happen]

So, in short, if you plan to make a full-bleed full color print with Lulu, remember that simple designs are the most effective, and if you want to go for some­thing more elab­orate, make sure you don’t rely on the PDF exporter to create a nice PDF; you’ll get better (and quicker) results by sim­pli­fying it for the program.

The silver lining is that the efforts you’ve made in sim­pli­fying the layout will make the PDF export much quicker!

End­notes:

1 First of these babies, Circle of Eights, a thick (350 pages) book, printed in black and white, without full-bleed. A com­pi­lation of col­lab­o­rative stories which have been running for more than a year.

Other books are Wisp (volume 1 and volume 2) a quar­terly com­pi­lation of the Wisp ezine printed in full colors, with full bleed.

written by Yuki \\ tags: adobe, book, circle of eights, eps, ezine, indesign, lulu, pdf, print-on-demand, process, wisp