Using Affinity Publisher to create books printed by Blurb.

[boorowaboy]

This post is to find other designers who may use Blurb, an American company which sources print output for their books in Europe and Australia and probably other countries as well. Blurb is a print on demand company. The standard of production is high and their response to questions excellent. The only downside is their link to Adobe and Indesign for production from PDF files. They also have their own book designing software which is good for non designers.

I am interested in finding other designers who may wish to exchange ideas and possibly see if AfPub is able to produce an interface with Blurb although that would be a remote possibility.

nb I have no links to Blurb other than have had them print several of my books. Most books were designed using Indesign however when it became a subscription service I changed to Affinity. So  now I am fairly good at creating a document which conforms to their specifications which are very rigorous, but understandable.

I look forward with interest to see if there are any other users.

If you are interested, the following link is a to a book I designed and co authored. Noel Ford is a distinguished artist and teacher at what was Canberra School of Art.

The book was printed by Blurb.

https://au.blurb.com/b/5662543-noel-ford-artist-teacher

cheers

adrian

[MikeTO]

An interface for Blurb should be a possibility when Affinity starts offering a plugin API which Serif has stated is in development.

In the meantime, I'm also working on a list of recommended export settings. Please let me know in this other thread what settings you find work with Blurb.

Cheers

[Andreas Scherer]

See https://support.blurb.com/hc/en-us/articles/360044955872-Affinity-Publisher-PDF-files

[mopperle]

@boorowaboy Hi Adrian, last week I sent PDFs to blurb. I will receive the book maybe next week. The book was mainly text, with some pictures and some graphics.

I'm currenly creating another book with mostly photos and very few text.

I used Blurbs Webpage, @Andreas Scherer posted and the setup for the content and the cover worked very well. The topic @MikeTO posted is although very helpfull, regarding the PDF export settings. Beside this I didnt do anything special.

The preview of the book you get after uploading the files was correct and although the final PDF I received.

I also worked with Indesign before and the onyl thing I was missing in the beginning was Blurbs Indesign-Plugin, which made the workflow a bit easier.

[Matt1978]

Hi @mopperle and @Andreas Scherer

Hopefully that's because I'm new to Affinity Publisher (and not just dumb!?) but I couldn't make sense of some part of the procedure you linked to. I couldn't find the "Spread Setup" that they are referring to (as shown in the screenshot)... I first thought it meant the Document setup but it doesn't appear to be. If by you could direct me in the right direction that would be great! 

Cheers

Edited June 5, 2024 by Matt1978

[boorowaboy]

Hi Matt 1978

I assume you are writing about preparing a book designed in AfPub and being printed by Blurb? If so I maybe able to make some comments.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, Matt1978 said:

I couldn't find the "Spread Setup" that they are referring to (as shown in the screenshot)

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @Matt1978.

You need to go to the Pages panel and right-click on the thumbnail of the spread/master page in question. ‘Spread Setup…’ is one of the options on the context menu that pops up.

Affinity Publisher 2 Help: Document setup

[MikeTO]

Those are instructions for Publisher v1 when the document's size was set in Spread Setup. In v2, Spread Setup is just for master pages.

Just choose Document Setup instead of Spread Setup. It will default to Whole Document (previously All Spreads). Click Dimensions instead of Set Dimensions of Page. You can't select Print now so don't worry about that. The instructions won't quite match v2 but it's close.

Cheers