Ewrick's Rabbit Hole

Here we go again… Another her­metic RIP failing message from Lulu.

180: Error- Text block will not RIP - CID 5722427

I checked again my file, and cor­rected what may be the cause of this. As Lulu’s policy now seems to be to directly refund your order and not bother with detailing what may be the causes of the PDF failing to RIP at the printer’s, I thought it may be good for me to write down the major reasons I’ve found that may be prevent a proper print job at their printers’.

Before I list them, some tips how you can “debug” your PDF (from the latest in the process, to the earliest):

• You can use Pitstop Pro free 30 days demo; it has a selection feature which high­lights nicely the bounding boxes and makes it easier to look for content extending from the crop area.
• You may use the pre­flight options (of Acrobat, or your DTP software); there are useful diag­nostics you can find there, deep down in the options
• You can do an EPS export first of your pages. It’s long and tedious, but if you open the EPS in an appro­priate software, you may notice quirks in the export before (how the page was flat­tened for instance; some­times an inter­me­diary high-resolution export of the little complex trans­parent illus­tra­tions to a PNG/TIF format may improve greatly the com­plexity of a page, and make the RIP job less bogged down at the printers’)

Now, some of the main pitfalls:

• CID encoded fonts — avoid them; perhaps not the reason for that message (since I got it after vec­tor­izing all the faulty char­acters, but not taking any chances, they were dis­played strangely in the EPS exports anyway).
• Images extending outside of the page canvas. Don’t believe the PDF crop, some may still be hidden around. The main reason is still the facing pages (I work in facing pages to have a proper page num­bering and com­po­sition, and it’s not a problem as long as you export in single pages, and check out for those over­lapping contents).
• Fancy effects on the texts: they usually create some “text used as clipping path” which doesn’t go too well in my expe­rience. Better ras­terize if absolutely needed, or find another method.

written by Yuki \\ tags: diagnostic, export, lulu, pdf

The long wait is now over, our favourite “out there” mag­azine Wisp is now available in a much expected printed format.

Two volumes have been made so far, each full color, with 100 pages of 3 con­sec­utive issues.

Follow the links below if you want to order your copy. The archives can still be seen for free on the website http://wisp.focusphere.net.

Wisp — Volume 1 (2008)

Wisp — Volume 2 (2008)

written by Yuki \\ tags: book, links, lulu, print-on-demand, stories, syncs, web, wisp

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.

Con­tinue reading »

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