lessons learned

[truepenny]

What 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.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

You are mighty! I hope there are copies left when I get back to wifi on the 2nd.

[raeraesama.livejournal.com]

This makes me think I'll try Createspace first when I try my hand at self-publishing. :X

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

it is all DEEPLY APPRECIATED. :-)

[paulwoodlin.livejournal.com]

Every time I consider self-publishing, I should read troubles such as yours to remind me of the perils for someone as easily frustrated with computers as I am.

[rabidfangurl.livejournal.com]

I would advise you consult copperbadge about type-setting and formatting for Lulu. He's self-published three books through them so far and actually *likes* doing the type-setting.

[cheloya.livejournal.com]

/me saves this post for future draft-printing reference

I'm sorry it's being full of suck for you. :(

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

Sorry it's such a pain in the ass. I'm getting ready to embark on this myself, and not really looking forward to it.

I am really, really looking forward to this book, though. At the risk of serious kissing ass, I love the Booth stories both on a craft and on a personal level. The Bone Key is one of the only books I've read more than once in the past four-five years, since I have had major concentration problems which have sapped my interest in reading. I am ecstatic at the prospect of being able to read the ones I wasn't able to catch elsewhere.

[bluestalking.livejournal.com]

Adobe! All of their products have user interfaces that are kind of related to each other, and the more of their products you use for a longer period of time, the easier it is to pick up, but YEAH. I use photoshop all the time and used InDesign for four years on my college lit mag and Acrobat when I was being an intern making PDFs of scans, and in short...it's awesome when they work but it is DEEPLY FRUSTRATING trying to figure it out. It's particularly great that their tutorials tend to be written in crazy gibberish that you only understand if you already know how to do what you're looking up.

re: The cover

[hominysnark.livejournal.com]

Will Lulu accept a pre-designed image for the entire cover? Because I would happily volunteer my services for the cause.

Re: The cover

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oooh, thank you!

And, yes, with these restrictions:
One-piece cover requirements:

* Your file must be a PDF, JPG, GIF, or PNG
* Spine width: 14.59 Postscript points wide (0.203") (61 px)
* Spine begins 429 Postscript points (5.96") (1788 px) from the left.
* Total cover width: 872.59 X 613 Postscript points (12.12" X 8.51") (3636px X 2554px)
* If using an image, its resolution should be set to 300dpi

So it's one image for front, spine, and back cover.

You rock!

Re: The cover

[hominysnark.livejournal.com]

Sent you a PM.

Re: The cover

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sent you an email. :)

[renatus.livejournal.com]

Gah, OpenOffice. It caused me considerable rage before I stopped using it because of its bewildering habit of ruining rtf files. My sympathies.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

Hmm, when I was in school we were taught that you *would* hyphenate library between the b and the r. The rule was you always separated a pair of consonants when you hyphenated.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Unless they're a whatchamacallit, like th or br. Also, I double checked with my American Heritage Dictionary, and it agreed: li-brary.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

A dipthong. And oh, ok, that makes sense.

[davidpv.livejournal.com]

Do you have Adobe PDF set up as a Printer on your computer? I usually convert my Word documents into PDF files by "PRINTING" them to the Adobe PDF Printer. This allows me to set properties, like embedded fonts.

[owldaughter.livejournal.com]

Brr... one year ago I was banging my head on the desk for exactly item #4. I'd edited and done page layout for someone's self-published book, and I said sure, I can totally do the formatting and upload for you. I'd never worked with Lulu before.

My main issue was that with a lot photos, the .doc layout would actually change minutely between Word and Open Office, meaning I'd have to go back to Word and poke things around again, then save, reopen in OO, and check every single page again to make sure everything was where I told it to be before I PDFified it. Usually, it wasn't. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The final product looked good, though.

[goingferal.livejournal.com]

I seem to be able to embed fonts in Word when I make a PDF, using Save As, PDF, then Options.

[carbonel]

A couple of comments, though all of them may be moot for this time around, if you have already been mighty.

Regarding:

2. Word will let you create custom page sizes, but IIRC (it's been a while) you also have to persuade the printer driver that you're using a custom page size in order to get a PDF that's really that page size, and not that amount of text superimposed on a standard 8.5 x 11-size page.

5. You actually can embed fonts from Word, but I believe that's only true of TrueType fonts that are defined as embeddable, which is not all of them.

Additional obligatory DTP note: While Word is usually my tool of choice and I am a serious Word maven, it's a dancing bear in terms of using it as a prepublication tool. The sorts of things you were struggling with are the things that separate Word from (these days) InDesign and (earlier) PageMaker, FrameMaker, and Quark.

[elmocho.livejournal.com]

Ah, the terrific hell of "digital prepress," complicated by Lulu's preferences for how they roll.

The little newspaper I worked for used photoshop for pictures and Acrobat 5.0 for distillation so we could send the pages to the press 100-odd miles away. Our number one problem, other than file size, was font handling and embedding.

Fonts that did not embed properly rendered as Courier. Fonts that looked like they embedded properly on our end-- even when we opened the full PDF-- would then not print properly when the press got the PDF, sometimes rendering as Courier, sometimes scattering to the four winds.

You have my sympathies.

[larryhammer]

Useful notes. (I'm working in FrameMaker rather than Word, so font embedding is no problem for me. Definitely good to know about the cover fonts.)

---L.

[davidlevine]

I feel your pain -- I went through all of this when I did The Mars Diaries last year. The secret turned out to be using PDF-X. Are you on a Mac or a PC?