sirram
Senior Printer
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
Posts: 269
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Post by sirram on Jun 19, 2020 15:11:45 GMT
For each book's content, I upload a PDF (the "source" file) to Lulu which uses it to build the "print-ready" version. It is the latter that one assumes is sent to the printers when one orders a print run.
Does anyone know the difference between the two PDFs? In the cases I've checked, the "print-ready" PDFs are slightly smaller than my original "source" PDFs. If Lulu fails to recover from its botched migration, and I need to find a new PoD provider, which of the two PDFs would be better to use?
Also, having only ever used Lulu's cover design wizard, would either of those PDFs also be portable to a new PoD provider?
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Post by Retread-Retired-Cameron on Jun 19, 2020 15:32:46 GMT
As an example if your A5 project PDF measures 148 x 210 mm and the "print ready" file which gets sent to a printer is smaller you'd want to upload the original 148 x 210 mm A% PDF to a new POD provider just in case the new provider's system similarly slightly reduces the width and height dimensions.
If you have your original cover JPG it should be portable to a new POD provider though you will have some learning curve on their cover creator. The one for KDP Print appears fairly intuitive.
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sirram
Senior Printer
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money
Posts: 269
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Post by sirram on Jun 19, 2020 17:11:21 GMT
Thanks. A useful reply re: the cover but are we talking about the same thing with the innards? I'm talking about the different PDF file sizes. One book I wrote has a (source) PDF file size of 36,013 KBytes. The Print Ready version generated by Lulu was smaller - 35,974 KBytes.
So, Lulu made changes to my source PDF. I was wondering what they may have been - and which of the two PDF versions I should prefer.
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Post by Retread-Retired-Cameron on Jun 19, 2020 18:26:41 GMT
On the innards I'd say go with your original source file. Since the difference between the two is 39 Kbytes it may simply be a difference in size due to file compression, but better safe than sorry.
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