I'm working on my very first physical book, which has been in the works for years, and I'm at the tail end of it all, but I ran into an issue.

For whatever reason, the manuscript, which is a PDF file, won't be printed due to transparency elements in the file, and the images seemingly being too small in resolution. I don't know how that's happening. I've been told I need to flatten the file in order to deal with the transparency, but I don't know how or where to do that. As for the images, I thought they were big and high quality enough, but I don't know how to check for PPI to make sure. I've tried a variety of different things, but I'm still at a loss.

Is there anyone out there that can either give me some advice or assistance? I'd greatly appreciate it.

Viking ZX here on FimFic would be a good place to start. He has published several books, as well as a fair bit of fanfiction.

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Thanks! I've sent him a message, so hopefully he could give me some help.

7774014 It would help if we knew how you assembled your PDF, and if you still have the individual pages laid out.

For Changeling Space Program's print book (currently at printers) I assembled the main text using a very old version of Microsoft Publisher, formatted the art in Adobe Photoshop, and put the two sets of pages together using Adobe Acrobat. I didn't directly insert the pages into Publisher because I didn't trust that software, as it doesn't allow you to set DPI on the images you insert. Flattening image files is done in an image editor like Photoshop- it means getting rid of all the layers, combining them into a single layer. Likewise DPI/PPI settings.

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Ok, well, first, I combined the entire story of mine into an .odt file, making tables through the majority of the file so that I can properly segregate and position the table of contents, page numbers, and chapter titles, which left transparent borders. I then made room for where the pictures would go (which I made the majority by hand, scanned them, and edited them in MSPaint... yes, I'm a caveman.), saved the file without the images, saved it again with the images applied, and then exported both files as PDFs.

So, I have two .odt word files, as many PDFs, and all of the images on hand, and I've done a variety of experiments trying to get it "flattened", but I can't seem to do it.

I don't have Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop.

So... yeah.

7774116 Ouch. Yeah, that would do it. I haven't used Open Office that much, but I know that in Microsoft Word the tables do NOT play nicely with the rest of the document. And I don't know of any way this problem can be fixed.

For what you want to do, page formatting (with master pages to set headers, page numbers, etc.) are your friend, and I don't know off the top of the head which Open Office app substitutes for Publisher.

Have you considered LaTeX? https://www.latex-project.org/ It's free typesetting software, it's what several of our Fantasy Horse Punk book publishers use. I don't know if Lulu accepts LaTeX documents, there is probably a work flow step or steps that I'm not remembering as I've never done this.

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Damn, cause I put in a LOT of effort to set up the tables so that everything fits nicely. I even made table borders transparent so they couldn't be seen if printed (when configured to a PDF, borders are entirely absent, but everything is fitting how I set it.)

But, like I said, I don't have a problem with formatting, but when I do put it through Lulu, it says that I need to flatten it and that the images are below 200 PPI, which is something I can't seem to check or do as I do not have Adobe Acrobat Pro. I've been trying to do various work arounds, but I can't seem to figure it out.

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That sounds interesting, but the issue is that I can't get my own document through to Lulu as it is, and the major issue is that I need to flatten and have images above 200 PPI, as I've already mentioned.

The flattening isn’t much of an issue. Someone with Adobe Acrobat, or probably some free PDF editors to do that fairly easy. I’d even be glad to do it for you if you were willing to send me the doc.

The bigger issue is the image DPI (PPI, whatever….). That’s not something you can fix without making changes to the source document and re-exporting to PDF. Does your word processor allow you to export to PDF in higher quality, or ‘for print’?

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I think it does, but I'm not entirely sure (I use OpenOffice). I have also exported the document without the images, so I could theoretically re-apply the images onto the PDF instead afterward.

Also, I could send the documents to you if you can fix this. It would be a massive help, to be sure.

In fact, I could send you a zip packet filled with the docs (both versions), images, fonts, and the PDFs as sample exports via WeTransfer, if you'd like.

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If you are able to re-export the PDF from your word processor in a higher quality, that may resolve the DPI/PPI issue. It's been a while since I've used OpenOffice, (Use MSOffice on work computers, and LibreOffice on the rest) but if that page that lets you save to PDF gives you options to change the quality, it may also give you other options that could let you export it without layers (flattened)

Give that a look first, but if you can't get it to work, send me a PM with links; I'm glad to spend a few minutes trying to help on my side. Not saying I'll spend a lot of time trying to get this figured out, but I'm glad to give it a quick go and see if I can find any simple solutions to it!

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I actually did try that during my export experiments, but there was no flattening feature, and even if I select lossless compression or compress at the highest DPI quality (1200), I still get dinged. Maybe the latter is that I have to select at 600, but even then it says it's too low.

I got your file(s) and took a look. I have also sent you a possible good PDF via PM.

I'm unsure about the PPI error. based on the resolution of the raw images you included in the zip, I'm going to guess the images just aren't high enough quality that LuLu is ever going to be 100% happy with it. Not completely sure though, that's just my hunch.

As for the layer-related issues, have a look at the PDF export I sent you, and let me know if LuLu is happy with it. Basically I just opened your *.odt in Microsoft Word, and did a new export to PDF, choosing the options for high quality, and PDF/A compatibility. (which should flatten any layers.)

Note that Word might have interpreted something different, so if LuLu does like it, please at least skim through the whole document and make sure I didn't royally screw formatting up somewhere.....

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I wanna thank all of you for the help! Through your advice, and lots of trial and error, I've finally published the story, and am waiting to receive the first copy in the mail. Seriously, I can't thank you guys enough for the help

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Living the dream!

Re: the images: If your original source images are just too low-res, I've found that waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan has been trained pretty damn well for doubling (or even more) the resolution of illustrations while still not making them look blurred or upscaled to a human eye. (There's a comparison example at the bottom of the page I linked.)

As for the proposal to use LaTeX, I'd suggest using LyX instead. It's a WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) tool with LaTeX on the backend that even my mother can use with a little help here or there when she wants a tweak to the built-in templates that isn't offered via the GUI... and I do suggest at least tossing two or three pages into it and seeing what you get. To someone with an eye for it, the typesetting shortcomings you'll get out of tools like Word, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice stick out like a sore thumb.

(The TeX engine underlying LaTeX, by comparison, was originated by someone who was a perfectionist about things like justifying text so the excess whitespace is distributed throughout the entire paragraph in the most visually pleasing way, rather than purely on a line-by-line basis... but I still think he was too clever for his own good. I don't care if you claim it's actually spelled Tau Epsilon Chi. It looks like Latin letters in a passage of English text, so I'm going to pronounce it "licks", "laytex", and "tex", not "lick", "laytek", and "tek".)

P.S. Sorry for being so late to the party. I hadn't checked my fimfic feed in at least a month.

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Thanks for the reply, but I've more or less figured it out. The book came out (mostly) excellently, and the pictures in the book look great. None of the table lines appeared either, so I guess It was a false alarm on Lulu.com's part.

Thank you once again for your interest.