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Jan. 25th, 2011
lessons learned
Jan. 25th, 2011 11:11 pmWhat I have learned from fighting with Lulu, MS Word, OpenOffice, and Adobe:
1. Lulu would really prefer that you use (and pay for) their formatting service.
2. You have to choose a page size from Lulu that you can convince your word processor to agree on. 6"x9" may be lovely, but Word has no idea what you're talking about. Go with A5 instead.
3. Although you can technically use any font you like for the interior of your book, the fonts Lulu offers for covers are quite limited, and some of them are very very ugly. Garamond is your best bet for harmony.
4. I hate Adobe.
5. Making a .pdf is not as easy as you think, because Lulu requires you to embed the fonts. Which you cannot do from Word. You can from OpenOffice, but in going from Word to OpenOffice, you must be careful. This is the thing I learned tonight with much raging in the streets: OpenOffice will quietly bork your .rtf formatting that you have slaved over like a dog, and you will not be able to unbork it, no matter how much you swear. On the other hand, the same formatting in .doc, it's nice as pie about.
So, get everything right in Word: page size, tabs, page numbers, fonts, hyphenation, justification. Then save as a .doc, and move over to OpenOffice to export as a .pdf, remembering to tick the PDF/A-1a ticky box. (Iä! Iä!)
6. And ... oh crap. If you have to change your page size after you've turned on the automatic hyphenation, you'd better go back and double-check it. Because, O Word, library is not hyphenated after the b.
If you'll excuse me, I have to go beat my head against this wall some more.
1. Lulu would really prefer that you use (and pay for) their formatting service.
2. You have to choose a page size from Lulu that you can convince your word processor to agree on. 6"x9" may be lovely, but Word has no idea what you're talking about. Go with A5 instead.
3. Although you can technically use any font you like for the interior of your book, the fonts Lulu offers for covers are quite limited, and some of them are very very ugly. Garamond is your best bet for harmony.
4. I hate Adobe.
5. Making a .pdf is not as easy as you think, because Lulu requires you to embed the fonts. Which you cannot do from Word. You can from OpenOffice, but in going from Word to OpenOffice, you must be careful. This is the thing I learned tonight with much raging in the streets: OpenOffice will quietly bork your .rtf formatting that you have slaved over like a dog, and you will not be able to unbork it, no matter how much you swear. On the other hand, the same formatting in .doc, it's nice as pie about.
So, get everything right in Word: page size, tabs, page numbers, fonts, hyphenation, justification. Then save as a .doc, and move over to OpenOffice to export as a .pdf, remembering to tick the PDF/A-1a ticky box. (Iä! Iä!)
6. And ... oh crap. If you have to change your page size after you've turned on the automatic hyphenation, you'd better go back and double-check it. Because, O Word, library is not hyphenated after the b.
If you'll excuse me, I have to go beat my head against this wall some more.