How to print an Apple Pages document as a book?

November 28, 2006 3:46 PM

How to print a document created in Apple Pages through a POD service like Lulu?

I spent dozens of hours creating a document in Apple Pages, hoping to send it to Lulu and have a single copy printed. When I uploaded my PDF to Lulu, though, I got a message saying that they couldn't handle PDFs that were generated from Pages. The same happened whether I used Pages' built-in "Export to PDF..." feature or used the Print dialog's "Save as PDF" button.

I tried running the document through ImageMagick to convert it from PDF to PDF, hoping it would be stripped of whatever taint Pages had left on it, but that didn't work either (perhaps it did nothing at all).

Does anyone know a way I can get around this without re-creating my document in another app? For example, is there a way to transform the PDF into one that Lulu can't complain about? Or, I'd happily use another service if I could find one that could do a single copy (100 pages, B&W) for no more than $20 or so.

posted by ezrakilty to computers & internet (6 comments total)

"In addition, Lulu's Global Distribution partner, LSI, insists that all author-produced PDFs be made with Adobe products."

It sounds like it's not something particular to Pages they dislike, but any PDF file not created in Acrobat.

The bottom of that page gives some suggestions about how to work around their printing partner's technical limitations.
posted by majick at 3:55 PM on November 28, 2006

You could simply give the PDF to anyone with Distiller/Acrobat and have them resave the file. Just make sure all your fonts are embedded, and proof the final PDF before you submit it. I'd be happy to take a crack at it for you tomorrow - hundertwasser at yahoo dot com.
posted by luriete at 4:43 PM on November 28, 2006

This is a known issue, as majick's link shows. One alternative is to upload the document in Word format, which Lulu also handles, though you'll obviously lose some control over the final output (e.g., fewer font choices).
posted by mcwetboy at 5:04 PM on November 28, 2006

Maybe run it through this?
posted by flabdablet at 3:55 AM on November 29, 2006

You could see if there's a Kinko's type place in your area that has Mac workstations. Usually they have the whole Adobe Creative Suite, so they should have a proper copy of Distiller/a proper Adobe-made "print to PDF" printer driver.

Then, as a failsafe, you could try setting the PDF output to an older version of the file spec. Just watch out for things like transparency and make sure you embed the fonts, etc etc. You'll be paying by the hour so make as many different versions as you can and toss 'em onto a thumbdrive.
posted by bcwinters at 8:36 AM on November 29, 2006

I finally got this sorted out. A few things I learned:

1) If you open & edit a PDF in Acrobat that was created by another program, Acrobat retains the "creator" information after you save it--so just running it through Acrobat didn't do the trick.
2) There is a field in the actual PDF file where it says what application created the PDF, in plain text; by changing that directly, in a file editor, I was able to get Lulu to accept the file.
3) For some other reason (perhaps I hadn't included all the fonts), Lulu's printer ended up rejecting my file, so I finally succeeded by
4) Using the "Save as PDF-X" in the Print dialog of Tiger. This saved all the fonts and also set the "creator" field to one that Lulu accepted.

Thanks all for your help.
posted by ezrakilty at 3:53 PM on May 8, 2007