Satisfying landscape book printing requirements for Lulu

[pawlt]

Hi - I am planning to publish a book using Lulu's print service using APub V1 and I am trying to figure out how to satisfy their print requirement for landscape books. The requirements specified here are that "Pages should be set up as portrait orientation (if you choose to make a landscape book, the pages should still be oriented as portrait and the page size should be adjusted accordingly)." I am assuming that what this means is that when I create the press ready PDF each page (which I have setup in APub to have a landscape orientation) should be rotated through 90' so that when I view the resulting PDF each page has a portrait orientation with text running vertically (I'm hoping that Lulu is going to somehow figure out that I'm not giving them a portrait book and that I want the binding on the short edge - but that's probably another story). This seems a bizarre requirement because I'm sure it's a no-brainer for modern printing machines to orientate incoming pages in the optimum way for how they want to print. Nevertheless....

I've asked Lulu support how to accomplish this but all I got was a regurgitation of the printing requirements. So after a lot of fruitless Googling I finally found this post here on the forum that seems to offer a solution. Since I am a newcomer to APub the terminology there didn't immediately make sense but after a lot of experimenting what I am doing is this:

1. I create a new document with a master page that has the same dimensions as my book but in portrait orientation and have the necessary bleed because images in my book extend into the bleed area.
2. I then File->Place... my book .afpub onto the master page and rotate it through 90'.
3. I start creating pages using the master page and for each page I:
   • Detach the master.
   • Click the placed document and select the right spread from the original book for the current page in the new book.
   • I do this for both the left and right pages of a spread.
4. I keep doing (3) above until I have all the pages from my original book in my new book.

The above seems rather tedious,  ie having to edit every page in the new book (is there a better way?), but it seems to work. That is, when I export the new book I have a PDF with all the pages rotated through 90' which I am assuming is what Lulu wants.

The only remaining problem is that the bleeds from the original book are not propagated to the new book. The page dimensions on the PDF file are oversized by the bleed but there is nothing there, just white space on those pages where in the original book the image has extened into the bleed area. When I look at these pages in the afpub doc for the new book, sure enough, the bleed in the placed book is not carrying over.

So I have a couple of question for you APub experts:

1. Do Lulu's printing requirements make sense, or am I overthinking it?
2. Does the method I outlined above to create a book with landscape rotated into portait pages the right/optimum way (have I missed some subtlety?).
3. Why are my bleeds not propagating - how can I fix this?

Many thanks

 

 

 

[thomaso]

Hi @pawlt, welcome to the Affinity Forums!

6 hours ago, pawlt said:

"Pages should be set up as portrait orientation (if you choose to make a landscape book, the pages should still be oriented as portrait and the page size should be adjusted accordingly)."

This use of the term "portrait" in lulu's description is indeed misleading. But fortunately they offer template documents that clarify this. See below the "A4 landscape" version (offered as .indd + .idml + .pdf), opened in APub V1. It shows the usual, common way of a landscape document where neither pages nor text are rotated. The way to the templates is shown in the first video under your posted link at 0:33 sec.

[lacerto]

It might still be that you need to rotate the pages after exported to PDF.

See this similar question on Adobe forums:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/self-pub-how-to-change-landscape-to-portrait-orientation-keeping-landscape-dimensions/m-p/14269608

[pawlt]

10 hours ago, thomaso said:

Hi @pawlt, welcome to the Affinity Forums!

This use of the term "portrait" in lulu's description is indeed misleading. But fortunately they offer template documents that clarify this. See below the "A4 landscape" version (offered as .indd + .idml + .pdf), opened in APub V1. It shows the usual, common way of a landscape document where neither pages nor text are rotated. The way to the templates is shown in the first video under your posted link at 0:33 sec.

Hi thomaso - thanks for your reply. I am aware of these templates that Lulu provide - in fact I used their 'US Letter Landscape' .idml template for my book and as you say the template interpets landscape in the usual way. What I am talking about is their instructions for producing the press ready PDF from a book based on this template. If there was nothing special about delivering a landscape book then I don't understand why they make a point of saying.....

 

17 hours ago, pawlt said:

if you choose to make a landscape book, the pages should still be oriented as portrait

The reply I got from my support request to Lulu was:

Quote

Our system requires files to be in portrait mode because commercial printers like the ones we use will try to rotate your pages if they receive a "landscape" orientation file

I don't really understand why I should be bothered if the  printer rotates my landscape pages so it can print them. Anyway all this points to the fact that the PDF I send them has to have portrait oriented pages regardless of the format of the book. I would be interested in whether anyone else has experience producing a landscape book in APub for Lulu.

Thanks

 

[pawlt]

5 hours ago, lacerto said:

It might still be that you need to rotate the pages after exported to PDF.

See this similar question on Adobe forums:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/self-pub-how-to-change-landscape-to-portrait-orientation-keeping-landscape-dimensions/m-p/14269608

Hi lacerto - thanks for your reply - the link does seem to confirm that the expectation is that landscape books have to be delivered to Lulu with pages rotated to portrait mode. So the process that I ourlined of placing an .afpub document into a new .afpub doc which has portrait pages would accomplish this and as long as I set the placement to linked I can still edt the original and have it reflected in the portrait doc. Having to detach each page in the potrait doc and select the right page from the original is a pain - is this the only way?

Anyway thanks for the link

[pawlt]

17 hours ago, pawlt said:

The only remaining problem is that the bleeds from the original book are not propagated to the new book. The page dimensions on the PDF file are oversized by the bleed but there is nothing there, just white space on those pages where in the original book the image has extened into the bleed area. When I look at these pages in the afpub doc for the new book, sure enough, the bleed in the placed book is not carrying over.

Hi - I just figured out how to fix this. It turns out that when you place a document you get an option underneath the menu bar that says 'Page Box' and a combo box with various options. The default is 'TrimBox' which trims the placed doc to its trim size. Another option is 'BleedBox' which expands the placed doc into its bleed area which is exactly what I want!

So I think I'm good to go - thanks to anyone who read my post and expended brain cells on a possible solution!

Cheers

[lacerto]

6 minutes ago, pawlt said:

Having to detach each page in the potrait doc and select the right page from the original is a pain - is this the only way?

I would probably rotate the pages using Adobe Acrobat Pro, but as the user on Adobe forum mentioned, just rotating the pages in Adobe Reader might be a change of a meta data and does not actually perform a change from landscape to portrait (even if visually causes the change).

Another option would be placing PDFs, since I think you could place all landscape pages in one go using PDF autoflow, and then select and rotate all pages in one go using the center point as rotation reference. PDF would also allow you to correctly import bleeds -- I am not sure if that would work well when placing a Publisher document. I have also bad experiences on placing Affinity document within an Affinity document, since the placed document content is interpreted, and there can be surprising conflicts between the actual inner content, and the wrapper, even if they use identical settings. 

[lacerto]

8 minutes ago, pawlt said:

So I think I'm good to go - thanks to anyone who read my post and expended brain cells on a possible solution!

Ok, hope this works! But have a good look on color values etc. of final exported PDF so that you do not have inadvertent changes.

[lacerto]

Here is what I had in mind:

 Notice how placing autoflown PDF pages does not result in centered pages so this needs to be fixed by using the Transform panel. Then you also need to enable for each page the cropbox, to have bleeds included in the final portrait export.

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, lacerto said:

It might still be that you need to rotate the pages after exported to PDF.

How would the binding edge be defined this way? How would the system know that landscape layouts rotated to portrait orientation need to get bound at the short egde?

@pawlt, does the website request an orientation decision for landscape when uploading a PDF for print?

The various hints given by lulu are quite ambiguous and seem to conflict with each other. For instance the hint to "adjust the page size accordingly" "when creating the PDF":   [AFAIK there is no way in any of their listed/recommended apps for PDF creation which allows to "adjust the page size" during export, nor to rotate on export.]

Also their requirement to set "portrait" but still have "the width wider than the height" sounds paradox to me. [AFAIK if width is wider than height it is NOT portrait, assuming a standard for dimensions with width as the first and height as second parameter, as they use them self in their layout page definition].

If you have no chance to explicitly define landscape somewhere in the upload /submitting area you possibly may try to contact them or other users via their blog. [unfortunately the newest user post appears to be 3 years old]

[lacerto]

4 minutes ago, thomaso said:

How would the binding edge be defined this way? How would the system know that landscape layouts rotated to portrait orientation need to get bound at the short egde?

I have no idea. You probably somehow specify the job specs when making the order. Lulu instructions seem very confused, just look how they specify A4 landscape.

[Twolane]

I dislike being a Negative Nelly, but why on earth would you use Lulu when both Amazon and Ingram Spark provide POD platforms that do a much better job?

[thomaso]

21 minutes ago, lacerto said:

just look how they specify A4 landscape

Ah, I haven't noticed that before: There the dimensions with bleed change the orientation 😳 … and: only for mm, not for inch. 🦄
This seems to proof that one can't trust their data or text.

2 hours ago, pawlt said:

I don't really understand why I should be bothered if the  printer rotates my landscape pages so it can print them.

Me too. Their printer may simply rotate the input for output as wanted, without involving clients at all. In my impression the requirements regarding "portrait" were written without the required knowledge for writing these requirements.

[pawlt]

6 hours ago, Twolane said:

I dislike being a Negative Nelly, but why on earth would you use Lulu when both Amazon and Ingram Spark provide POD platforms that do a much better job?

Hi Twolane - thanks for the suggestions - my book is essentially a photo book with text for which I want good quality colour printing on decent paper. I did investigate IS a while ago but was put off my their PDF requirements - now I know a bit more I think I will push on them a bit more, so thanks or the reminder.

[pawlt]

6 hours ago, thomaso said:

How would the system know that landscape layouts rotated to portrait orientation need to get bound at the short egde?

Hi thomaso - thanks for your various feedback - the question about how a rotated landscape book gets bound has bothered me and has been lodged with Lulu support - no answer yet - but it's kinda crucial. Given Lulu's inability to properly justify their press ready PDF requirements maybe I should be looking elsewhere, per @Twolane's suggestion.