Tarkblog

I posted before that my new book is now available via www.pragprog.com.

The folks at work wanted a way to showcase the book off to customers when they came in. Since the book isn’t available in print, this is kind of tricky. However, I got the permission of the publishers to print myself a copy for this very purpose.

I wanted the book to have a very book like feel, and not just something we printed out of the printer at work and threw in a 3 ring binder. I looked around for some online printers, but most require some minimum number of copies, like 25. I certainly didn’t need that many copies.

lulu.com is a company that basically lets you publish your own books, and they also offer a print on demand service. Since I already had the book written, and I don’t need their selling services, I had a go at their print on demand services.

I created my account and got things set up. I uploaded my PDF using their process, and instantly got an error telling me about Helvetica font issues. See, when the books are printed by my publisher they use a special Helvetica font that they have purchased. However, when they create the PDFs, that font isn’t embedded into the PDF itself, probably because of redistribution issues. Instead, your system finds a comparable font (Arial, perhaps?) and uses that in its place.

Lulu, however, requires that all of the fonts that are to be printed reside in the PDF itself. So I switched over to the wife’s computer, because she has Adobe Acrobat and that gives me the ability to play. I had to somehow get a Helvetica font and get that saved inside of the PDF.

Easier said that done. Helvetica is owned (by Linotype, I believe) and the only way to get it is to buy it. It’s not super expensive, but there are a few different Helveticas (think bold, italic, and bold AND italic). Each requires a separate purchase.

Even comparable fonts were going to work because they didn’t have the NAME Helvetica. This was going to be an all or nothing thing.

After reading around some more, I found a good solution. I converted my PDF back to post script using Adobe Distiller. Postscript is just a plain text format, which is easily editable via a text editor. I downloaded a free set of replacement fonts from Redhat, called Liberation. I edited the postscript file and did find and replaces for Liberation and Helvetica (and lots of ohters, like HelveticaItalics for LibItal, etc). This took a little while to get it all right. I reran acrobat and regenerated my PDF. And it worked beautifully.

I re-uploaded to lulu.com and got past the initial error. But then, had another problem. The PDF size is 7.5 x 9, but that isn’t a size supported by lulu. They have a few different sizes available, and the closest to mine is 8.5 x 11. But your PDF has to already be that size.

This took quite a while to figure out. I eventually found a place in Acrobat that allows you to resize. Distiller wasn’t cooperating, even though I found a place that was going to do it — the final result never came out right. But after toying and searching, I finally got this all fixed via Acrobat.

Another upload, and all went through. Next they wanted to know about my cover. I just wanted to use the cover page of the existing book PDF. However, when you design a book cover you have to design the front/back/and fold all as one piece. They wanted me to upload a PDF that was somthing like 11 x 18. I didn’t have that.

I toyed around with their tools for a while and finally got it working. I was able to get my cover on the cover, and the rest of the cover relatively blank.

I sent the thing off to the presses. The book is around 230 pages, and I had them print it in full color because I thought it would look cool. This cost around $50 with shipping (work paid for it, don’t worry); it would have been substantially cheaper for a black and white print.

A few days later, this guy shows up:

The cover looks a little funny because the original book cover is designed for a smaller size book. As well, you see in the open book picture above that the page borders are smaller than the actual pages. This was something I had to live with - I wasn’t about to try and do a massive edit to resize the whole thing.

However, I did find a big issue with the print:

In my graphics, the fonts didn’t always print through properly. In this example, in the left box center is a “p”, but the right box center is a square representing an empty glyph. Also, the top and bottom texts are all glyphs instead of text. I don’t exactly know why this happened. All of the images were .eps files, which are encapsulated postscript. I don’t know why some text made it through and other didn’t. I’m sure it has to do with font embedding, but at this point it doesn’t matter. The hard copy is here, and even though the fonts are messed up in many of the images, the textile feel of the book is very nice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.