View From the Publishing Trenches

Let’s take a quick look at what your book’s PDF file should include before you ship it off to your printer of choice. Don’t worry if some of this sounds like an alien tongue; we’ll address each item individually in future posts.

Note: I realize I haven’t blogged much lately — other than the auto-posts of my daily Twitter messages — but that’s only because of the congruence of the hectic activity around Christmas and several major book projects in work. I hope to get back to at least thrice-weekly blogging.

OK, enough with the excuses…on to the topic at hand.

First, I highly recommend that you create your PDF from true layout software rather than the ubiquitous Microsoft Word, something like Adobe InDesign or QuarkXpress. MS Word does a lot of things very well…but book layout and typesetting just ain’t one of them.

Second, I also recommend that you contact your printer BEFORE creating the PDF of either the book interior or cover. Find out if the printer has any particular preferences or requirements.

Third, your best results will come from creating a Postscript file (PS file extension) and using Adobe Acrobat Distiller to create the actual PDF. That doesn’t mean you can’t create a PDF directly from within your layout software — in fact, InDesign does a very good job of that. But we have found that using the PS-Distiller-PDF path yields that best, most consistent, and (often) smallest file.

Here are the key elements that your final PDF really, really needs to include:

1. Make sure that all fonts used in the document are fully embedded, even if the fonts are among the many standard ones found on almost every new computer. What if you have a somewhat newer version of a font or even one with the same name from a different foundry (font designer)? It just might fail their preflight.
2. Make sure all images are inserted at (a) the proper resolution (usually 300 dpi), (b) use a very-low-compression format or, even better, an uncompressed format (e.g., highest-quality JPG for the former, PSD or TIF for the latter), and (c) are in the proper color space (e.g., 8-bit grayscale for black-and-white interios and CMYK for full-color covers).
3. The final page dimensions for the print-ready PDF reflect the book’s final trim size plus whatever bleed amount your printer requires.

Two final notes about those images used in your book or on its cover:

1. Make sure that any resizing of images is done in an appropriate graphics editing software and not in the book layout software. Resizing an image during layout will change the effective resolution in the final PDF. If you need a 300 dpi image and it will be printed at 4 in. by 6 in. in the book, it must be 1200 pixels by 1800 pixels BEFORE you import and place it in the book.
2. Make sure the image is saved in the proper color space from your graphic editing software BEFORE placing it in the book. True, most real layout software can convert those color spaces but, often, the images will need some “tweaking” after conversion…and that can only be done in your graphic editing software.

Finally, I also recommend that you develop the habit of running your own preflight inspection before you submit it to your printer. We typically run a preflight from within InDesign before creating the PS file. Saves us time if we find any errors. We also run a preflight from within Adobe Acrobat (not the free Acrobat Reader, but the full-up, pricey version). Only if it passes the Acrobat preflight do we ship it to the printer.

Next time, I’ll discuss a bit more about embedding fonts and the potential pitfalls.