Efficient But Unfussy Lulu Print Job
February 9, 2010 10:12 AM Subscribe
Any advice re: settings for printing up a a book containing a slew of articles for reading in paperback form via Lulu.com?
There are lots of tutorials for (and discussion of) Lulu.com. But I can't find any resource with advice for using Lulu for what I'd imagine to be a bread-and-butter purpose: to print out a slew of articles accumulated (via web, email, etc) which I would, at this point, prefer to print in tidy book form rather than do a 300 page print-out on 8.5x11" sheets.
Obviously, in this situation I don't care about finesse. But I do want the result to be highly readable, and to make reasonably efficient use of the paper. So I'd love to suggestions re: fonts, margins, gutters, and any other settings people have found to work dependably for this sort of relatively unfussy purpose.
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Standard disclaimer:
Yes, I realize that my question itself is unfathomably stupid, and all my assumptions and motives are in sore need of questioning. By conceding all that, I've saved you the trouble of having to point it out! And discussion will hopefully proceed from my idiotic question, rather than loop back to parse its idiocy. Thanks!
There are lots of tutorials for (and discussion of) Lulu.com. But I can't find any resource with advice for using Lulu for what I'd imagine to be a bread-and-butter purpose: to print out a slew of articles accumulated (via web, email, etc) which I would, at this point, prefer to print in tidy book form rather than do a 300 page print-out on 8.5x11" sheets.
Obviously, in this situation I don't care about finesse. But I do want the result to be highly readable, and to make reasonably efficient use of the paper. So I'd love to suggestions re: fonts, margins, gutters, and any other settings people have found to work dependably for this sort of relatively unfussy purpose.
~~~~~~
Standard disclaimer:
Yes, I realize that my question itself is unfathomably stupid, and all my assumptions and motives are in sore need of questioning. By conceding all that, I've saved you the trouble of having to point it out! And discussion will hopefully proceed from my idiotic question, rather than loop back to parse its idiocy. Thanks!
The Lulu Publishing Help states that they accept submissions in Doc, RTF, WPS or PDF formats. So your question about formatting is not specific to Lulu; its really a general question about combining many articles into a single file.
If each article is already a nicely formatted PDF (which might be the case if they are magazine/journal articles), you could just concatenate them, using Preview on a mac, or a command line tool. If they're not already PDFs, you could either convert each to a PDF individually: eg by printing web-pages using File->Print (Save as PDF) on a Mac, or some free PDF generator like pdf995 on a windows machine. If the web-page is ugly, you could copy and paste into a word-processor, tidy up, and then export as a PDF.
Of course, this will generate a slightly disjointed appearance, with each article formatted in a slightly different style. If you want a uniform style, you'll probably have to cut and paste the lot into a word-processor, DTD program, or LaTeX (which I would personally use for the task). Previous AskMeFis on thesis fonts and general thesis beautifying give useful advice.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 12:43 PM on February 9, 2010
If each article is already a nicely formatted PDF (which might be the case if they are magazine/journal articles), you could just concatenate them, using Preview on a mac, or a command line tool. If they're not already PDFs, you could either convert each to a PDF individually: eg by printing web-pages using File->Print (Save as PDF) on a Mac, or some free PDF generator like pdf995 on a windows machine. If the web-page is ugly, you could copy and paste into a word-processor, tidy up, and then export as a PDF.
Of course, this will generate a slightly disjointed appearance, with each article formatted in a slightly different style. If you want a uniform style, you'll probably have to cut and paste the lot into a word-processor, DTD program, or LaTeX (which I would personally use for the task). Previous AskMeFis on thesis fonts and general thesis beautifying give useful advice.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 12:43 PM on February 9, 2010
Response by poster: Hi, James
The concatenation and format matching issues are not big problems on my end. I can easily create a decent looking unified PDF.
But this is, of course, book printing, not paper print-outs. Font size, margins, gutters, etc, need to be optimized for that format. Not sure how to do that. I'll go check those previous threads (not sure how I managed to miss them), thanks!
posted by jimmyjimjim at 9:15 AM on February 10, 2010
The concatenation and format matching issues are not big problems on my end. I can easily create a decent looking unified PDF.
But this is, of course, book printing, not paper print-outs. Font size, margins, gutters, etc, need to be optimized for that format. Not sure how to do that. I'll go check those previous threads (not sure how I managed to miss them), thanks!
posted by jimmyjimjim at 9:15 AM on February 10, 2010
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posted by jimmyjimjim at 10:14 AM on February 9, 2010