Red Skies at Night

July 11, 2009

On printing via Blurb’s PDF to Book: Part 3

Filed under: POD, books, photos, printing, products, reviews — Eric Jeschke @ 10:30 pm

Chickens, Anyone? (Blurb #1), originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Key: R20090711-220603-levels

My Blurb edition of Chickens, Anyone? showed up at the door yesterday.

My first impression is favorable: the pictures look crisp, color is more or less correct (modulo the more muted palette of printed reproduction).  Binding and alignment are a little on the poor side, but then this is one of the least expensive of their offerings (softcover, “regular” paper).

Upon examination with the loupe, and comparing closely with the Viovio book I had done last year, I can see that the halftoning pattern is more noticeable on the Blurb book, and yet the pictures to the naked eye look more clean and less “muddy” than on the former.  It’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, because last year was black and white, however, the same camera in each case was used.  I’m tempted to get this year’s book printed at Viovio to compare.

Text is nicely rendered, and without any traces of smudging.  The 10 point font, which looks miserably small on an online PDF next to the huge images, shows up fine in the high 300 dpi resolution of the book. The cover has a nice glossy finish, but my copy was marred by a few small scratches.  I think I’d recommend the hardcover for this reason.

Overall, a positive impression.  I’m expecting another version any day now that was done in LaTeX.  I’ve been meaning to blog about that, and maybe I’ll wait until that version arrives to comment further.  Overall, I’m pleased with the PDF to book process at Blurb and the Blurb product. Recommended.

July 6, 2009

Going Kayaking

Filed under: photos — Eric Jeschke @ 4:37 pm


Going Kayaking, originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Key: R20090621-160558

June 30, 2009

On printing via Blurb’s PDF to Book: Part 2

Filed under: POD, books, photos, printing, process, workflow — Eric Jeschke @ 10:51 pm

Tyler with Chicken, originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Key: R20090612-133201

As I reported earlier, I uploaded two PDFs of my SoFoBoMo book Chickens, Anyone? to Blurb to try and utilize their new PDF to Book service. Yesterday I got back an email that directed me to their web site, and reporting that the PDFs were not the proper size. I checked the size tonight using the Document Properties of the Mac version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, assuming that would give me as accurate information as any. Sure enough, the sizes were wrong. Turns out I had made an assumption about the function of the “trim box” parameters on the PDF/X-3 export dialog under Scribus. I had assumed that Scribus would add some extra trim (defined by the L, R, T, B parameters) to the exported document. Uh-uh. The document gets exported as the size you defined in the Document Setup. Ok, makes sense, I guess. These trim parameters must just set some metadata in the exported PDF.

So, back into Scribus I go to adjust the size by a smidgen larger and wider in both the cover and the book.  Fortunately, I’m getting real good at this now, because it’s mindless work.  Only you can’t be completely unmindful of it, or you will make a mistake and have to go through it all again. Now I’m even more tempted to try the TeX layout!

This time it only took 15 minutes or so of tweaking and then two more PDFs were wending their way up to Blurb.  This time the “preflight check” was very fast, and in a matter of a couple minutes I got back another email saying that the text PDF was ok, but the cover was still off.  I checked it again and it was the right size.  I hazarded a guess that maybe with the extra blank pages at the front and back that Blurb throws in that I needed to make it a smidgen wider, so I widened it by .01 inch, regenerated the PDF and uploaded that and the same text block PDF back up to Blurb.  Bingo!  2 minutes later the preflight check passed for page count, PDF/X-3 compliance, size and image resolution.  “Your book is ready to be ordered”.  A couple of clicks later and my order was confirmed.  Priority mail, “3-5 business days”.

Let’s see, add about 3-4 days for Hawaii… I should have part 3 of this report up in about a week, give or take a little, when the book is in my hands.

June 28, 2009

On printing via Blurb’s PDF to Book: Part 1

Filed under: POD, books, photos, process, tools, workflow — Tags: , , — Eric Jeschke @ 2:48 pm

End of the Evening, originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Speaking of unfinished tales, I finally had a chance to log into Blurb.com to read about their new PDF to Book service (side gripe: why do they make you log in just to read about it?! ).  I am looking to POD publish my recent SoFoMoBo effort, Chickens, Anyone?.

I was steeling myself for the task of making individual images of every page of the book, and dealing with the intricacies and system requirements of the proprietary Blurb Booksmart software, when I ran across a pointer to the new service on Paul Butzi’s blog. I applaud Blurb for providing the new service, which is sure to be popular with folks like me that don’t want to deal with proprietary software, hacked workarounds or cookie-cutter templates. In a nutshell, the service allows you to upload your own prepared PDF of the book, so long as it meets some fairly typical, albeit stringent, requirements for book publishing.

I found that just like last year in my trial of the Viovio POD service, I still had to do a fair bit of tweaking to the document to fit the exacting requirements of trim and bleed and so forth. This was even after designing the original with the idea of getting it printed on Blurb’s 10×8 landscape offering. Fortunately, Scribus offers an “Align and Distribute” window that lets you fairly quickly fix things up after adjusting the page size, but it’s still more pointing and clicking nonsense than I’m used to.  I’d really rather edit a text file, however arcane (TeX anyone?), and have that regenerate the PDF. Come to think of it, I might try this experiment again using TeX or LaTeX.

In any case, Scribus offers some excellent support for the PDF/X-3 subformat required by Blurb. According to Blurb, you are able to keep your images in sRGB and their printer software will convert appropriately to CMYK. Alternatively, you can download their ICC profile and convert your images to that. I downloaded the profile for future reference, but this time around I’m going to try leaving the images in sRGB and see how it goes. As with Viovio, you prepare the text as one PDF and the wraparound cover as another. This is yet another reason you have to tweak your book  from the initial web-targeted version.

Long story short, after about four hours of tweaking, converting and resampling, I had the two PDFs uploaded to Blurb and a note in my mailbox that they were doing a “preflight check” of the file. I’m supposed to get another email when the check is finished and there are either problems found (and I need to tweak some more) or the book is ready to order. I’ll report back again when I hear from them.

June 22, 2009

Billy at the Ol’ Fishin’ Hole

Filed under: photos — Eric Jeschke @ 11:16 pm


Billy at the Ol’ Fishin’ Hole, originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Key: R20090620-173640

“Billy”

Filed under: photos — Tags: — Eric Jeschke @ 11:10 pm

“Billy”, originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Key: R20090620-173613

I managed to get my SoFoBoMo book uploaded to the official site tonight, thus marking my finish (with a couple of days to spare).

I had to be stubborn as one of these and hang in there to finish it, but it was well worth it!

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