PDF to Blurb
Sure, in the past you could load your PDF into Photoshop, crank out jpgs for each page, and then load those jpgs full bleed onto pages in Booksmart, and get a book printed on Blurb that way. I’ve done it – I did it with my SoFoBoMo book last year. It works. I had trouble with loading the jpgs, and had to drag the individual page images into Booksmart one by one, and my hands hurt for two days.
But this looks more interesting. I haven’t even read everything, but it claims to be a way to generate your PDF, and then pass it directly off to Blurb for printing.
I’ll be trying it. If you try it, let me know how it works.
Thanks for the hint, it seems promising for InDesign users. I used the manual way – generated jpeg images from the pages using Ghostscript and imported those into Booksmart 2.0. Fortunately there weren’t any problems in loading the jpegs. It didn’t take too long as I had only 40 pages to go.
As ever, you can reasonably expect me to be dissecting this. I skimmed over the how-to download early this morning and it looks pretty good: clear guidance on trims and marigins, covers, colour management (it supports a fully colour managed workfow & profile is published). Just a week too late for my latest order.
I saw it as well. No, I won’t use it for the two books that I still want to do after “Urban Dreams II” turned out fine: last year’s “Tscheppaschlucht” and “Urban Dreams I”. The layouts of both are done, the PNG export via Photoshop is not so painful when you use an action, and when the page images are numbered, you can load them in BookSmart 2.0 in one operation, and with a second click they get auto-distributed on the pages.
Really, at the moment I see no big advantage, but of course I’ll use the process for my next book.
Perfect timing! Thanks for the heads up.
–Eric
Andreas – thanks for the hint on the auto-distribution of the numbered page images, I didn’t know this was possible in BookSmart.
For Mac users, an easy way with photobooks is to do the layout and typesetting in Pages (part of the iWork software), export at best quality to PDF, and then compress the PDF file and generate numbered image files with Ghostscript (which is built-in).
A copy of the Blurb version of my SoFoBoMo photobook is shipped but in transit, so I can’t yet comment on the quality.
I was part of the Beta for PDF uploading – I’m still waiting on my book (shipped today, woot!) and can feedback when it gets here.