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Blurb Book Publishing from a PDF | 4
A Brief Note on Color
Our digital printers use the standard four color print process
that most every printing press uses – CMYK, which stands
for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. These four colors are
combined to give you the full-color reproduction you expect
with printed materials. Monitors and digital images use a
different color space called RGB, which stands for red, green,
and blue. If you are unfamiliar with color management and
are already glazing over, feel free to skip ahead. Blurb’s PDF to
Book workflow follows industry standards for digital offset
printing and color management. Most customers will receive
quality printed results without needing to understand the
details around color spaces and color management.
In the PDF to Book workflow, all RGB color spaces are con-
verted to sRGB, then to CMYK at the HP Indigo print device.
Therefore, all CMYK color spaces remain as is and are not con-
verted. Depending on your preferred color space, you’ll want
to follow these guidelines for optimal print results:
1. If your images are already sRGB, it is not necessary to con-
vert to CMYK because the HP Indigo is preset to convert
sRGB to CMYK.
2. If your images are Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, Colormatch
RGB, or another RGB color space, the optimal workflow
is to convert your images to the CMYK profile optimized
for the HP Indigo presses that Blurb uses. This ICC pro-
file – HP5000SemimatteExp05.icc – can be downloaded at
blurb.com/downloads/HP5000SemimatteExp05.icc. Color
conversion is best done via an imaging program, such
as Adobe® Photoshop®,prior to placing your images or
graphics into Adobe® InDesign® or your preferred layout
tool.
• If you are a B3 member or have already converted your
images to sRGB for use in Blurb BookSmart® you can ei-
ther keep then sRGB or convert to the B3 CMYK profile.
3. If your images are already CMYK, you also should not con-
vert back to RGB or a different CMYK space. If you choose
to do so, there is only a small gain in color vibrancy and
much more degradation of the file for the amount of effort
needed.
Use a CMYK color palette for native graphics and text within
InDesign® or your layout tool of choice. The digital presses
we use are unable to process spot color at this time.
content, like text, should be kept within the safe area. In
the templates, this boundary is a grey box that extends to
within a 1/4” [0.6 cm] of the edge of your book; that 1/4” [0.6
cm] space is a safety margin to allow for any small discrep-
ancies when the pages are printed, cut, and bound. If this
sounds confusing we recommend using our templates to
ease the burden of all these specifics.
• Dust jacket fold line: Shows on the dust jacket template
where the back and front flaps will fold.
• Dust jacket fold over allowance: Shows the 1/4” [0.6 cm]
strip of the dust jacket that actually wraps around the
edge of the cover of the book; it’s neither on the front nor
the back of your dust jacket, but on the narrow side of the
hardcover edge. We recommend extending artwork from
the front of the dust jacket across the fold lines to this fold
over allowance line.
Make it great. blurb.com
How to C#: Basic SDK Concept of XDoc.PDF for .NET XDoc.PDF for .NET allows C# developers to edit hyperlink of PDF document, including editing PDF url links and quick navigation link in bookmark/outline.
export pdf bookmarks to text file; create bookmarks pdf file
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Blurb Book Publishing from a PDF | 5
• Images should be between 150 and 300 DPI for the best pos-
sible print production.
• When you publish a book from your PDF, you get access to
all of Blurb’s great creative publishing services. After up-
loading your finishing files, you, or a friend or client have
15 days to place your order. Also, you can make your book
available to the book-buying public in the Blurb Bookstore,
you can sell it via Set Your Price, and more.
Ok, let’s get started!
A Few More Things to Know
Digest a few more Blurb book-specific tips, and you’ll be good
to go.
• Keep in mind that this is a digital offset press, not tradition-
al offset lithography – what that means to you is that your
book’s pages are printed on single sheets on both sides,
rather than in traditional signatures. So, when you design
your book, the pages in the layouts will be sequential and
two-page spread may not match up precisely.
• Blurb has one black and white book option. The 5x8 B/W
Text size is great for text, but it can also include black and
white images. Note that any color images you place in your
template will actually be translated to black and white
halftone for printing. It can have a full-color cover, just like
the other book options.
• The books you make with Blurb must have an even num-
ber of pages – anywhere from 20 pages to 440 pages.
• To print your book, you’ll upload a PDF for your book’s
cover and a second PDF of the book’s pages.
• When you export your PDF files, you need to use the
PDF/X-3 standard. A subset of the usual PDF, it is designed
specifically for reliable prepress file creation. In other
words, the PDF/X-3 standard makes sure that our book
print engine will play well with your PDFs.
• A single page with a small Blurb logo is inserted at the end
(last page) of all books printed with Blurb. You can specify
this page to be white or black, or you can remove it entirely
for an additional fee per book. It’s called the Custom Logo,
and details on the pricing are here: blurb.com/create/book/
pricing. You do not need to account for this extra page
when designing your spine and it is not included in your
final page count for pricing, but if you choose to remove
or replace it with your own logo, you will be charged the
Custom Logo fee. Also, all Blurb books come with a white
end sheet at the front and back of the book. Again, you are
not charged for these sheets.
Make it great. blurb.com
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Blurb Book Publishing from a PDF | 6
Publishing your own books with Blurb using PDF to Book is easy. Just follow these
steps, and soon, you’ll have bookstore-quality books in your hot little hands.
Six Easy Steps
1. Download our PDF to Book templates or use
the PDF to Book specification calculator
• Go to Blurb’s download page blurb.com/make/pdf_to_book
and grab the template package for Adobe® InDesign®.
We provide cover and page templates for both Mac and
Microsoft Windows users, and for InDesign® versions CS2,
CS3, and CS4. Click on the link to your operating system
and version of InDesign® to start the download to your
desktop or wherever you choose.
• If you don’t use InDesign®, you can use this book-specifi-
cation table. It provides all of the measurements you need
to create your own book from scratch. If you’re interested
in learning InDesign®, Adobe® provides a trial version of
InDesign®, which can be downloaded and used for 30 days
without purchase.
2. Design a New Book
To create a new book, use the PDF to Book templates to guide
your design in InDesign® or the book-specification table.
Each of our cover templates is named according to our stan-
dard trim sizes, cover options, such as a hardcover book with
a dust jacket, and by the number of pages. You create two files
for your book: one for the cover and one for the pages. On the
templates are general instructions that will help make sure
your book is printed and trimmed properly. These won’t print
when your book is published, and you can hide them so they
don’t distract you from your design.
There are a few other things to keep in mind when you’re
designing your book. We prefer images to have a resolution of
between 150 DPI and 300 DPI for the best possible print repro-
duction. Blurb books need to have an even number of pages,
so remember to include the single page on the right as you
open your book and the single page on the left at the end of
your book in your final page count. Also, pages print double-
sided, so if you want printing on only one side of a spread, you
need to include blank pages.
Blurb Book Publishing from a PDF | 6
Make it great. blurb.com
Make it great. blurb.com
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Blurb Book Publishing from a PDF | 7
This InDesign template is for a hardcover book with a dust jacket. The grey box shows
where to put text and images, the blue lines show the spine, the black lines shows
where the pages will be cut, the red line shows how far to extend images for a full
bleed, and the green lines indicate where the flaps will fold over the cover.
3. Export as a press-friendly PDF/X-3.
Next, from within your design application, make a PDF of
your book cover design and a second PDF of all of the pages of
your book. We provide export settings files InDesign® (and
other Adobe® products) to make sure your PDFs are exported
in the correct PDF/X-3:2002 (Acrobat 4 compatibility) format;
the file is downloaded along with Blurb’s template packages
in a folder called “Export Settings.”
Name your PDF something clever, like mycover.pdf and
mypages.pdf; note that the extension is still .pdf, even though
you saved it with the PDF/X-3:2002 standard. When you use
our Export Settings, your PDF files are automatically saved
with Acrobat 4 (1.3 PDF) compatibility. If you’re not using
InDesign® and our Export Settings, make sure you select that
option in the compatibility field.
Get ready to give us your PDF files – before you upload, we
suggest printing your files on your printer, running a spell-
check, and reviewing your book design page by page one last
time by opening the exported PDFs in Adobe® Acrobat®. Ac-
robat does its own preflight check as you click through each
page and may save you from uploading a PDF with errors.
4. Upload your PDF.
Upload your PDFs to Blurb at blurb.com/make/pdf_to_book.
Our Web site walks you through the upload process in just
four steps. One, you tell us what size book to expect from you.
Two, you enter your book’s title, author name, and category.
Three, you upload your book cover PDF, and, four, you upload
your book’s pages PDF. We’ll tell you when your PDFs have
successfully uploaded, but please be patient,
The upload may take a few minutes – or even a few hours if
your design is complex or you have a very large PDF. (Pho-
toshop and CMYK files may take longer to upload due to
increased file size.) The largest press-ready PDF/X-3 file you
can upload is 2GB. If you continually have issues trying to up-
load your book you might want to try an alternative or faster
internet connection or contact customer support at blurb.
com/help
As soon as your PDFs are uploaded, we’ll immediately give
you a PDF Job number online and via email. Your PDF Job
number is a tracking number and should be referenced if
you need to contact customer support. You will also find in
progress PDF jobs listed on your signed-in home page. At this
point, your book’s status is Preflight Check, and you’re well on
your way to becoming a published author.
The PDF export window within InDesign shows the Blurb PDF/X-3 Export Preset.
Make it great. blurb.com
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Blurb Book Publishing from a PDF | 8
5. Preflight and review
We will email you to confirm that we’ve received your PDF
files, and we’ll do a big preflight error check to make sure it’s
the correct size and format and generally happy and ready to
print. We’ll let you know if we run across any problems with
your book’s files, like if you have an odd number of pages or if
your cover design doesn’t correctly map to the dimensions in
your template.
6. Order and publish your book
When your book is ready for printing, we’ll email you a link
that you can use to order your book. As soon as you’ve placed
your order for one copy of your book, you can add it to the
Blurb Bookstore, sell it to the world, or keep it private. To cre-
ate additional cover or paper options for your book, simply
walk through the above process for each version. You’ll then
be able to offer both hardcover and softcover editions through
the Blurb Bookstore. To do this, you simply transfer your
cover and page designs into the appropriate templates, export
them as PDF/X-3 files, and upload them to blurb.com.
The PDF upload wizard on Blurb.com walks you through the entire process in just
four steps
Make it great. blurb.com
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Blurb Book Publishing from a PDF | 9
Make a Blurb PDF to Book with
Adobe® InDesign®
1. Download Blurb’s InDesign® templates
• Navigate to Blurb’s template download page: blurb.com/
make/pdf_to_book/template_indesign
• Choose your book size. Click on the button next to the size
book you want to make.
• Click on your version of InDesign® that matches your
operating system. We provide templates for both Mac and
Microsoft Windows users. The download will start auto-
matically. The template packages are named for the version
of InDesign® and the size book they support. For instance,
if you want to publish a 10 x8 Standard Landscape book
with InDesign® CS3 or CS4, you would end up download-
ing the template package folder named “CS3-4_Std-Land-
scape-Templates.” Within that folder are more folders, one
for each cover option and one for the pages. Each of those
folders has templates for our standard papers and premium
papers, and those cover templates are based on the number
of pages in your book. The page template is the same, no
matter how many pages you plan for your book.
2. Save the InDesign® templates to your computer.
The template packages will download as .Zip folders. Save
your template folder to your preferred folder on your desktop.
Make sure you easily navigate to that folder from InDesign.
(See our PDF to Book FAQs for more on how to unzip the
template folder.)
3. Create the pages of your book.
For our example, let’s take a 10 x8 Standard Landscape hard-
cover book with a dust jacket designed in InDesign® CS4.
Launch InDesign®, go to File/Open, and navigate to your
desktop folder where you saved the templates.
• Open the Blurb to Book PDF template folder called “CS3-
4_Standard-Landscape-Templates.”
• Open the folder called “CS3-4 Pages Template and open the
template called “Pages_Std-Landscape.indd.”
Blurb Book Publishing from a PDF | 9
Choose your book size.
Click on your version of InDesign® that matches your operating system.
Go to File/Open, and navigate to your desktop folder where you saved the templates.
Make it great. blurb.com
Make it great. blurb.com
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Blurb Book Publishing from a PDF | 10
• Complete your design for your book’s pages with the tem-
plate you opened.
• Save your file to your desktop.
• Create a book cover with InDesign® templates. Designing
your book’s cover works the same way. Launch InDesign®,
and following the example above, open the “CS3-4_Stan-
dard-Landscape-Templates” folder.
• For example, if designing a hardcover with dust jacket –
Open the folder called “CS3-4 Cover-Dust Jacket Template,”
and then open either the “Premium-Paper” or “Standard-
Paper” folder.
• Open the template that supports the number of pages you
want in your book, such as “Cover_DJ_pp20-72_Std-Land-
scape_STANDARD PAPER.indd.”
• Complete your book cover design with the template you
opened. (Check out Adobe’s InDesign® magazine for tips
and tricks for using InDesign® at indesignmag.com/de-
fault.asp.)
• Save your file to your desktop.
5. Load the Blurb PDF preset file.
• Go to the templates folder you already downloaded from
Blurb.
• Open the Export Settings folder from within the Blurb
templates folder.
• Launch InDesign® and navigate to File/Adobe PDF Presets/
Define... A dialog box will open.
• From this Adobe PDF Presets dialog box, click the Load but-
ton, and then browse your desktop to the export settings
file called “Blurb PDF X-3 Export Preset.joboptions,” and
click Open.
• Click the Done button.
Go to File/Open, and navigate to your desktop folder where you saved the templates.
Load the Blurb PDF X-3 Export Preset
Make it great. blurb.com
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