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