Friday, March 16, 2007

3rd book arriving before 2nd book =
GOOD NEWS

The third book I had ordered from CafePress has beaten the second book here, and I've got great news: it works!

You'll recall that I had ordered the third book after having created a PDF on my own, using a method completely different from the one recommended by CafePress to create my document.

Listen up, Mac users--

Let's assume you've got Adobe Acrobat (full suite, not just the Reader), and are planning to self-publish through CafePress. If you need to whittle your document down to the correct page dimensions for proper printout, use the "crop" feature in Acrobat after you've created your PDF. I'll go into this a bit later, but know this: it works like a charm. You avoid the messiness of having to follow the convoluted instructions on the CafePress site,* and you get an almost-WYSIWYG result every time. I say almost-WYSIWYG because you need to assume your printed text will be about an eighth of an inch higher than it should be on the page. I don't know why this happens, but that's the result I've seen in both the first and third copies of my book. I'm pretty sure the second copy, when it arrives, will have the same problem. All one need do is adjust top and bottom margins in one's word processing document before generating the PDF.

What's next: tweak the cover design one final time, then tweak the text (thanks, Charles), then re-generate the PDF and cover images, then upload the whole mess, and voilà-- the book will be ready. Expect that to happen this weekend. No, seriously. This weekend.

Believe me, I'm as exasperated as you are. "You" meaning "you dozen people who read this blog semi-regularly, and not the other 400 or so people who hit the blog after Googling 'dick bouquet' and 'hairy pussy' and the various unsavory cartoons I've drawn." (Like this one.)





*Go here, scroll down to "Create Custom Sizes," and start reading. The procedure is way too complex, and was written for Windows users. Just know that all you need to do is (1) generate your PDF, (2) crop it to the correct page dimensions using the "crop" function, and (3) make sure the document is formatted for PDF version 1.5, not 1.6. That's it. No kidding.


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