Thursday, March 26, 2009

About printed and PDF photobooks


A hole in snow, originally uploaded by jiihaa.


Ducks in water, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today I wasn't much interested in photography, but took some photographs nevertheless. Here are two images, showing that spring is progressing little by little.

There has been discussion about photobooks on various forums related to SoFoBoMo '09, especially concerning the prind-on-demand (POD) publishers and their problems in handling PDF files. I'm interested in making both a PDF version of my SoFOBoMo book, and a printed one. And I don't much like the idea of doing the same thing twice, first for PDF and then for POD.

Markus Spring wrote a good comment on this: "So using any page layout software seems the way to go: Checking for the dimensions of the intended book-to-be-printed, doing the layout and exporting the pdf, and later on decide about physical printing."

I'm still hesitating between Scibus and Pages as my typesetting program. Pages is simpler, but Scribus has already proven (in SoFoBoMo '08) to handle both the PDF and printed photobook. For the POD publisher, I'll almost certain use Blurb, having had good experiences of their quality. (However, that was done using their own software for typesetting.)

Update: The column I wrote about photography in public places appeared today (in Finnish, Valokuvaaminen sallittu, kiitos!). It remains to be seen whether that generates any discussion on the topic.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

What worked well for me with blurb, was exporting full page jpegs (with bleed regions), then dropping them straight in to blurb's booksmart as a full bleed image. With a bit of care and sensible page numbering, it was only a couple of clicks to get the whole thing from InDesign into Blurb's software.

I think I wrote about how to do it somewhere, last year, on my blog - I'll need to check.

Anyway, what that means is it is better to use some sort of layout software that lets you export individual pages - not sure if pages does that or not.

Juha Haataja said...

I'll check this out with Pages. At least Scribus makes this possible, Martin Doonan has blogged about this in detail.

Juha Haataja said...

It seems that Pages (at least the iWork '08 version) can export the document to a PDF file (and the results seems good), but not into separate image files.

Thus, there would be a need to do this with some other software. Probably the built-in tools in Mac OS X can do this, but there is of course the question whether everything works as it should (color management etc.).

Anonymous said...

Hi Juha, I have also signed up for sofobomo '09. You seem to use a Mac, as I do. This is no news maybe, but you're right, you can always print out to PDF page by page, if Pages doesn't support this.

Juha Haataja said...

@Ove: Actually, what I need is to get high-resolution (fit for printing) jpeg images of the pages from the PDF file (or directly from Pages), to be included as full-bleed images into Blurb or another POD system.