Getting PDFs printed

[Mad_Jack]

Also, if you want to have anything on the spine of your book, you'll need to look at lulu's preview of the cover and then figure out how to free-hand that onto your combined covers file (or at least, I did).

If you rotate the image 90 degrees so that the spine area is horizontal, you should be able to use the Text function of whichever program you're using to add the text to it. Once you're done, just make sure that the text is part of the background image instead of still being a separate item, and rotate your image back to its original orientation.
It's simple enough that you can do it in Paint if that's all you have.

I've never used lulu to print a book, but the basic process for making a single front-spine-back cover image is:

Open a new image in Paint or whatever you're using, and make it 11 inches high by 17 (which is 8.5 times 2) + X inches wide.
X is however thick you need the spine to be - the place you're uploading the final image to should have instructions on that. (They'll also probably tell you whether or not your image needs a border (blank or colored) around it.)

Find the largest, highest quality versions of your front and back images that you can.
(Resizing them can alter the quality if you change them too much, so making them a little smaller is always better than trying to make them bigger.)
The simplest thing to do is simply open them up in whatever you use to view images and then just right-click and copy the image.

Go to your new image, right-click and paste the back cover image into the left side of the new image, resizing it and making sure it's lined up well against the side, top, and bottom edges (zoom in for this part). Then copy the front cover image and paste it into the right side of the image, which should leave a blank space in the middle of the image however wide the spine is going to be.

Rotate your image 90 degrees so that the spine area is horizontal and use the Text function to add your book title.
If you're recreating a cover for an existing book, just find an image of the book's spine online somewhere and use the snip-and-sketch function of your browser to select the appropriate area, cut it out and copy it to your clipboard so you can paste it into the appropriate area on your new image.

Rotate your image back to its original orientation, check your work carefully, and then save it as a PDF*... Unless there's a specific limit to the file size of the PDF, save it at as high a quality as you can.

*If you're using a program that won't natively save your image to PDF format, save it as a JPEG or PNG, and use one of the free online converters.

The process may seem daunting at first because there are multiple moving parts to it, but each part in and of itself is relatively simple - it's just a bit time-consuming - and if you're bothering to print out a book, you might as well make it look good, right?

 

[Alzrius]

If you rotate the image 90 degrees so that the spine area is horizontal, you should be able to use the Text function of whichever program you're using to add the text to it. Once you're done, just make sure that the text is part of the background image instead of still being a separate item, and rotate your image back to its original orientation.
It's simple enough that you can do it in Paint if that's all you have.

Yeah, that's how I ended up doing it. The hard part is that doing so in MS Paint means that it's easy to misalign/oversize where you've placed the spine text, so that when you look at it again in the cover preview in lulu you can see that the words aren't perfectly aligned with the spine, at which point you need to go back and try again.

 

[CleverNickName]

I've had PDFs printed for me at a number of places...from a local print shop, to the campus bookstore, to Kinko's. Only once has someone actually checked the watermark to make sure that it was a legally-purchased PDF (the watermark was an email address, and they checked to make sure that it matched the email address that I used when setting up the print order.) Most of the time they don't bother.

It's by far easier and cheaper to order them print-on-demand from a company like DriveThruRPG. But sometimes that's not an option, and that's when I start shopping around for print services.

 

[Teo Twawki]

Even just printing a personal copy for yourself counts as copyright violation

While Lulu may say this (especially to indemnify themselves from action), it is not illegal to print something for undistributed, personal use; this is part of the "fair use" doctrine (§17 U.S.C. SS107).

 

[Micah Sweet]

I always just use Office Max, and never had a problem.

 

[toucanbuzz]

I use Lulu as well with great results, including hardcover. Good prices, quick return, cheap shipping. Lulu doesn't do original covers, so you have to either do nothing (generic color with a title you give it), or art you resize to fit the print.

As to legality, I paid for the PDF (so I can print it as I see fit so long as I'm not profiting off it).

Price-wise, I just printed a 450-page game book (out of print, impossible to find an original), hardcover and full color, for around $40. The only thing I couldn't justify was glossy, hard-to-tear pages like most official products have. Those doubled the cost. I have to be careful because it's regular print paper that can rip. For smaller PDFs in the 50-100 page range, with a soft cover it's wonderfully cheap.

 

[Alzrius]

I use Lulu as well with great results, including hardcover. Good prices, quick return, cheap shipping. Lulu doesn't do original covers, so you have to either do nothing (generic color with a title you give it), or art you resize to fit the print.

As to legality, I paid for the PDF (so I can print it as I see fit so long as I'm not profiting off it).

Price-wise, I just printed a 450-page game book (out of print, impossible to find an original), hardcover and full color, for around $40. The only thing I couldn't justify was glossy, hard-to-tear pages like most official products have. Those doubled the cost. I have to be careful because it's regular print paper that can rip. For smaller PDFs in the 50-100 page range, with a soft cover it's wonderfully cheap.

One more point in Lulu's favor is that they're one of the easiest sites to find coupon codes for online. You should always be able to get 15% or thereabouts off when you order from them.

 

[Deeds]

thanks for all the thoughts and suggestions!