John wrote:
Hi everyone
I've used LyX from the beginning and love it!
But in the last few weeks I've been inspired to raise my horizons and print a
book sized book.
In the past I have printed all my LyX documents on A4 paper.
But for a book that is far too big. So I decided to try for 9" x 6" or 225mm x
160mm which seem to be the sizes offered by local Print on Demand businesses
in New Zealand.
I would welcome advice by people who have used LyX to produce PDF files for
printing and binding by POD businesses.
I have done this once. They wanted a camera-ready PDF, for a custom
page size. It has been some time since then so I don't remember everything.
But feel free to keep asking.
My difficulty is that, having set the page size in LyX, it shows up fine in
xpdf but seems to be scaled to A4 when viewed by Acrobat Reader (which I
suspect will be what the POD company will use).
It should hopefully _print_ fine anyway, which is what matters.
When I attempt to print it on my home printer (with A4 paper in the tray), the
pages are the right size but appear alternatively at the top left and the
botton right of the A4 sheets - resulting in sheets that cannot be trimmed to
size without cropping off the content of one face of the sheet.
I guess your book is set up to print on both sides of each sheet, but the
printer you use prints single-side?
What you see is a consequence of two-sided layouts - the page origin
alternate between two corners because page two is supposed to
go on the backside of page 1 and so on throughout the book.
Consider trying this:
Put a single page in the printer. Print first page.
Turn it over sideways and insert it again, and you should get the second
page printed on the backside so that cropping will work.
For book printing, don't turn over pages individually. Have LyX print
all the odd pages in reverse order. Turn the entire stack over, then
print the even pages in normal order. You should now
have your book. (Experiment with smaller runs of pages until
the procedure works.) Some printers may not need the
reverse order stuff, this depends on the output order.
Another test: just take page 2 and put it on the backside of page 1.
Check that cropping works this way.
Getting a duplex printer might be interesting too, if you're going
to print more than the occational test book.
There are bound to be tricks to this, both for printing at home so that I can
guillotine the A4 down to the size I want, and for submitting a PDF file
which a Digital Printing business can use directly.
Ask the printing business about what they want.
I needed to add crop marks (used for cutting pages precisely), the
"crop" latex package supports that nicely. If it looks like A4 in
acrobat, then
the crop marks fitting the real size will show the print people what you
mean.
Also, try the three ways of making a pdf: export->PDF
(dvipdfm/pdflatex/ps2pdf)
In my case, dvipdfm was the only way that worked for everything. That was 5
years ago though.
Helge Hafting
