![]() In a nutshell? Send us 2 PDF files. One should have a single page that contains the artwork for the cover (or two pages if your cover is printed on the inside as well). In modern print production exporting print ready PDF files from InDesign is really easy but still you have to know which options to include and which to modify. Do- It- Yourself Book Press – No Media Kings. By Hamish Mac. Donald. UPDATE: Hamish has started a DIY Book podcast! Back in 2. 00. 0, I wrote an article for this website about how to produce your own book. Things have changed considerably since then, both in the technology available to individuals and in the services available in the marketplace. ![]() ![]() It’s all good news for us independent publishers. The original article was called “DIY Book Production.” Aside from being a clunky term, you now have more power than that: You can be your own press. I now produce my own books at home from start to finish, and in this article will explain what I’ve had to learn and acquire in order to do that. Generally, self- publishing involves an inverse relationship of work to money: The more work you’re willing to do, the more money you can save; the more you want to just skip to an end product, the more it’ll cost you. Self- pub: Four times more options than in 2. When I self- published my first novel, double. Zero, in 1. 99. 9, I wanted to create a book to sell in stores. A big folded- over photocopy sandwich didn’t appeal to me, but I really didn’t know how else one could make a book, so I laid out the pages and the cover, then paid Coach House Press to do the production work. There may have been other ways to do it, but having written a book about Y2. K, I didn’t have the time to find out. Now, though, there are four main options available: Offset printing. Print- on- Demand. Hand- bound hardcovers. Perfect binding. Here’s a summary of each (with special emphasis on the ones I like!): Offset printing. Offset printing is a high- volume printing method that uses large machinery to transfer text and images from metal plates to rubber pads then finally to paper. Coach House Press is a sterling example of a traditional press who care about their work. Their price was also the best I found — cheaper by $1,5. Cynthia pipes in: I second that recommendation wholeheartedly. The moment I walked into Coach House to discuss the printing of Some Words Spoken, my nervousness dissolved. They are crafty elves who understand the feeling and flavour of books. One of the largest parts of the printing cost is the set up of the colour press. Once it’s up and running, leaving it to print 1,0. We printed extra covers and stashed them, so when our books sell out (!) and we need another 5. We’ll only have to pay for the black and white guts of the book, and the binding. The colour of the cover might shift when it goes to press. Your pretty proof from the designer might not match the final product. Make sure you get a proof from the printer and make any colour adjustments at that point. Once they’ve burned printing plates, it’s too late for you to be fussy. Pro: You get a lot of books. A large run of books is not much more expensive than a short run. Con: You get a lot of books. Expensive. In 1. 99. I paid $3,0. 00 for a run of 5. Because of the mechanical set- up costs, a short run of books is practically as expensive as a long run. You probably don’t want thousands of books. Even 5. 00 is an awful lot to move. It’s a one- shot deal. What you need: Print- on- Demand. Newer digital printers don’t need to be mechanically adjusted to switch between jobs, so Po. D publishers can print copies of work as needed. I’m fussy about how my work looks, and the one Po. D service I looked into seriously (the reputable Cafe. Press) involves turning your pages into funny- sized PDF files and uploading them to the invisible maw of a webpage. I’m generally comfortable with Internet anything — online banking, making purchases, auctions — but I’m used to revising and reviewing and revising and reviewing until I like what I’ve created; I didn’t feel confident about what I might get from this method and took it no further. So my discussion of Print- on- Demand ends here. Pro: Less expensive than traditional printing. No stockpile of unsold books. Con: Bookstores won’t carry them. Each has to be ordered at a retail price, which stores won’t pay. Stores also can’t return them if they don’t sell, which is the practice they’re accustomed to. The price per book to you, the author/publisher, is often close to the retail price. The cover templates they offer are often yeechy. Some Po. D shops promise and charge for marketing and promotion they have no intention of delivering (listing you in a vast catalogue, for instance, does not count as promotion). The way these businesses pitch themselves plays on the emotions of frustrated yet ambitious authors. What you need: Ultimately I’m happy I didn’t go this route, because instead of tying my work into a company’s Po. D service I learned the following two methods, which have been a fun breakthrough in my career. Hand- bound hardcovers. It’s easier than you might think to create a hardcover book of your work. There are endless fun ways to adapt the handmade book process, too: For Christmas 2. I made all my own presents — journals, photo albums, even a pop- up stage with a wee cartoon actress for a friend of mine who’s in the theatre. These were a real hit. Don’t ask me what I’m doing next year to top it!)Pro: Complete autonomy: You can do it all yourself and retain complete control. Easy start- up. Can be done with common materials. Produces a result that’s personally satisfying and has a quality feel to it (a hardcover book!). Easily adaptable to a wide variety of creative projects. Hand- made work occupies a premium space in people’s minds if it’s done well. Con: A time- consuming process. Stitching can be tricky at first. Longer books involve some unwieldy sewing. Difficult to put your title and name on the cover (block printing, silkscreen, and Japanese Gocco printmaking kits are some options, but I haven’t tried them). There are good explanations of the process here: DIY Planner – Bookbinding. Toby Craig’s book assembling photojournal. To be honest, though, it took me a while to get the hang of “saddle- stitching” pages together. I found it hard to follow even the best of diagrams. I finally got it when I read Peter and Donna Thomas’s excellent Making Books by Hand. Now that I have the hang of it, it’s actually fun, almost therapeutic, to sit and stitch a book together. Producing a novel this way, though, is not so much fun. Where my wee book of short stories or a journal contains ten or twelve “signatures” — sewn- together groups of pages — my third novel makes up twenty- six signatures. That’s a very, very long thread, and a lot of bits of folded- up paper to keep organized while sewing them together. Here’s how to do it yourself: For these next two sections, I’m going to divide the materials section into two options: “Minimum” and “Press”. The minimum requirements will allow you to get started and learn without much initial investment, if any (depending on how much craftsy material you’ve got lying around the house). The “Press” materials are in case you decide, as I did, that you wanted to produce store- quality books at home, without having to go out and pay for commercial print shop services anymore. What you need: Minimum. Press. A completed, typeset manuscript printed out. A finished cover design. A sharp blade and ruler. A rotary- blade guillotine. Your pages will be much more even using one of these. Hard paper board for the covers. I was using matting board like you’d get from a framing shop until I found large grey boards in an art shop that cost a fraction of the price. Bookbinding board is available, but the board will never be seen, so it doesn’t need to be fancy. I’ve tried corrugated cardboard, but it’s too puffy; it doesn’t feel like a proper hardcover. An awl for punching small holes in your pages. Or you can also sink a needle into a piece of dowelling. I use a model- maker’s drill, which is like a watch screwdriver with a 1mm drill bit, and drill through all the pages before folding them. You can also get eggbeater- like hand- drills that will accept a small bit, but I found this harder to control and snapped several bits. Heavy thread. You can run it across beeswax to make it easier to work with and less likely to tangle. Paper. Regular copy paper will do, or you can use an ivory stock for an antiquey look. Heavy paper or paper- backed cloth for wrapping around your cover. Ordinary cloth can work but lets the glue leak through, which looks spermy. PVA Glue. I thought this must be something special when I bought it from a paperie, then discovered is the same old stuff that we peeled off our hands as kids. In. Design Export to PDF Settings Explained. Magazine and print designers must be versatile in many areas. Design and typography is a must, image color correction is a good bonus, but to be able to work on your own, which means creating print materials from beginning to an end, you have to know lots of stuff about prepress process. Creating error free print ready PDF files is one such thing. Some 1. PDF output. To export pages of your magazine to printing house you had to print pages to a . Post. Script) file. This process was called Print To File. Then the prepress team in the printing house sent those files to a RIP (Raster Image Processor) which converted Post. Script files so that the image setter can recognize them and create four sheets of film, each in one process color. Later came PDF output. But in the beginning it was not direct exporting to PDF. Again, you had to create Postscript files. Print ready files were then “distilled” in an application called Distiller, which resulted in the PDF file that was ready for print. Today In. Design can directly generate PDF files without the need for Distiller. Of course, Distiller is still available to convert Post. Script files into PDFs, if necessary, but directly exporting PDF files is the recommended method of creating PDF files. It’s faster and easier to generate PDF files through direct export. Again, as in other production related posts we will deal only with the necessary options that will be of use to you. All of the screen shots in this post are from my custom preset which is set up from the joboptions file I got from the printing house with which I work very often. Before we start it is good to point out that the images in your publication have to be in CMYK color mode and at least in 2. You can go lower than this, but than this will affect the quality of the images in print. If you are not sure if all of your images and documents are print ready, check out our post about preflight which will help you determine if your layout files are error free. An Overview of PDF settings. For a start, let’s go through some of the important settings in export PDF menu. Adobe PDF Preset indicates whether a default preset or a user- created preset is being used. If you’ve started with an existing preset and modified some of its settings, the preset name is followed by the word “modified”. You will always work with your own presets so we will show you how to create one of your own. Other presets can be really handy. For example, Web preset is good if you have to export small sized PDFs, with 7. Print preset is fine for printing PDF files on your local printer. This will shorten the time that the printer needs to process PDF files and images are exported in 1. Compatibility indicates the minimum version of Acrobat required to read the file. The label in parentheses shows the PDF file specification that applies; for example, “Acrobat 5 (PDF 1 . PDF will be compatible with Acrobat 5 . PDF 1 . 4 specifications. Proper compatibility also affects other applications that must process the PDF, such as imposition software and RIP. While an Acrobat 9/1. RIP may not allow you to use it. Consult with the prepress team in your printing house about the requirements for your RIP, to determine the appropriate compatibility setting. General includes basic file options, such as page range. The choices such as Bookmarks, Hyperlinks, and Tagged PDF affect only interactive PDFs and do not pertain to print- ready PDFs. Compression allows you to specify settings for compression and downsampling of images. Additional options let you compress text and line art, and crop images to frame limits. Always use compression settings, because if you do not compress the images in the PDF, the file will be huge in size and it may cause problems to the RIP when processing those files. Always compress your images. This will save you time and PDF files will be significantly smaller. Marks and Bleeds options let you include crop and bleed marks, as well as page information, bleed, and slug area. Printing house with which I work does not need printer’s marks at all, so every check box is empty. I set up bleed in my documents by default so I checked this option. Output controls how colors are converted (or preserved), based on your choices and the color management settings in effect. Important option here is to set color conversion to “No Color Conversion”Advanced controls font embedding and subsetting, OPI comments, transparency flattening, and the inclusion of JDF information. Select “High Resolution” in Transparency Flattener option. Embedding includes the entire character set of a font in the resulting PDF; subsetting is a form of embedding that includes only characters used in the document, and results in a smaller file size. It is advised that you never create a PDF without embedding or subsetting fonts. Default PDF presets. Here we will discuss the three most commonly used presets. You can modify each of these and re- save them. As you can see from my own preset drop down menu I modified all of them to suit my needs. I will point out which options to change. By adjusting them you will get presets that will suit you much better, PDF files will be smaller in size and quality will be sufficient for the intended purpose. Smallest File Size. Appropriate for online distribution or e- mail attachments. Do not use it in commercial printing, where reliable viewing, online proofing, and reproduction of the original content is crucial. The Smallest File Size option aggressively compresses and resamples image content, and converts all RGB, CMYK, and grayscale content to the s. RGB color space. This may result in noticeable color shifts from the original artwork. Settings include: Compatibility: Acrobat 6 . PDF 1 . 5), which maintains live transparency and layers. Color Images: Bicubic downsampling to 1. You can change this to 7. Compression = Automatic (JPEG); Image Quality = low. You can change it to medium. Grayscale Images: Bicubic downsampling to 1. Again, you can change it to 7. Compression = Automatic (JPEG); Image Quality = Low. Change to medium. High Quality Print. Intended for printing on in- house and desktop printers. Any RGB, Lab or spot- color content will remain in its original color space, not converted to CMYK. Bare in mind that printing with these settings in no way will correspond to the final, traditionally printed output. For the most accurate printing resemblance, print your pages on proofing printers. For that you will use either custom made preset or the Press quality preset. High Quality Print settings include: Compatibility: Acrobat 5 . PDF 1 . 4), which maintains live transparency. Color Images: Bicubic downsampling to 3. You can change this to 1. Compression = Automatic (JPEG); Image Quality = Maximum. Grayscale Images: Bicubic downsampling to 3. Again change it to 1. Compression = Automatic (JPEG); Image Quality = Maximum . Output: No color conversion; includes tagged source profiles. Press Quality. The settings of the Press Quality preset create a PDF that converts color content to CMYK using the specified destination profile, which locks the output to a particular device. Compatibility: Acrobat 5 . PDF 1 . 4), which maintains live transparency. Color Images: Bicubic downsampling to 3. Compression = Automatic (JPEG); Image Quality = Maximum. Grayscale Images: Bicubic downsampling to 3. Compression = Automatic (JPEG); Image Quality = Maximum. Monochrome images: Bicubic downsampling to 6. Compression = CCITT Group 4. Output: Convert content with profiles to destination; preserve color numbers for untagged content; maintain spot colors. Some printing houses will say it is OK to send them PDF files created with this preset but most of them will ask for you to create PDF files with their joboptions file, which leads us to the next chapter. Custom made PDF preset. Each printing house has its own rules and regulations regarding the way that the PDF files should be made. Some like to have a whole magazine outputted as one large PDF file, some like it page by page. Some prefer all page marks to be on, some like them to be off. Talk with your printing house and ask them what kind of PDFs should you send them. The majority of printing houses will send you their joboptions file which you will save in User/Library/ Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PDF/Settings on Mac and on a PC, they’re stored in C: \Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Adobe\ Shared Documents\Adobe PDF\Settings.
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