This document contains information on creating industry standard print pdf files. For those who wish to bypass our file creation process, and have experience with creating industry quality printable materials, you may create your pdf print files directly and upload them via your account page.
If you are uploading your own PDF, follow these guidelines:
- Fully embed all fonts used in the document. Take care that all fonts are only embedded once. Subsetted fonts over multiple pages can cause problems when your PDF is rasterized for print. Your document may be printed with symbols instead of fonts, garbled text or missing text.
- Set compatibility mode to PDF 1.3 (PDF 1.3 does not support transparencies and will flatten them when creating the PDF).
- Leave the PDF's colorspace in its original profile. Do not convert CMYK to RGB or vice versa.
- Solid blacks will print solid at 100% with no other colors added. If you do add colors to improve the richness of the black, TAC (total area coverage) should never exceed 270%.
- Avoid very light color builds of less than 20%. Below 20% tint variation is very difficult to control on a consistent basis.
- Turn off Overprint and Simulate Overprint
- The PDF filesize should not exceed 700MB
- If your image DPI is greater than 300, downsample to 300 DPI.
- Flatten your images.
- Flatten all transparancies.
- Do not use any security / password protection. The printer will not be able to print the PDF.
- Image compression should be set to ZIP if you want lossless (no artifacts/distortion-free) images. To reduce filesize, use JPEG -> High. Do not use CCITT or LZW compression. LZW compression creates multi-strip images, which may show white lines when printed.
- If you are printing a color book that has black & white images in it, the black & white images should have the colorspace set to grayscale.
- The gamma of a grayscale image should be between 2.2 and 2.4.
Front Cover usually includes a photograph or illustration, book title and subtitle, author's name.
Back Cover: Can include an excerpt from or summary of the book, commentary, author photo and bio.
If you are looking to market your book, you will probably also want to include a UPC bar, an ISBN and a price on the cover. We can take care of this for you, so let us know!
In the meantime, you will need to find a good quality photo or illustration for the front cover. “Good quality” means a resolution of at least 300dpi (dots-per-inch). You can find the dpi by looking at the file properties of the image in your graphics editing software.