When creating a PDF with Adobe Products, use Lulu's Adobe Job Options (Available at the bottom of this page). After downloading them to your computer, double click the icon and it will be installed into all Adobe products.
If using OpenOffice, follow the instuctions here: How to make a PDF using OpenOffice
If you are uploading your own PDF, follow these guidelines:
- Fully embed all fonts used in the document. Take care that all fonts are only embedded once. Subsetted fonts over multiple pages can cause problems when your PDF is rasterized for print. Your document may be printed with symbols instead of fonts, garbled text or missing text.
- Set compatibility mode to PDF 1.3 (PDF 1.3 does not support transparencies and will flatten them when creating the PDF).
- Leave the PDF's colorspace in its original profile. For full color books, the source document and/or images should be in the original colorspace. If it was created in RGB, it is not necessary to convert it to CMYK and vice versa.
- Solid blacks will print solid at 100% with no other colors added. If you do add colors to improve the richness of the black, TAC (total area coverage) should never exceed 270%.
- Avoid very light color builds of less than 20%. Below 20% tint variation is very difficult to control on a consistent basis.
- Turn off Overprint and Simulate Overprint
- The PDF filesize should not exceed 700MB
- If your image DPI is greater than 300, downsample to 300 DPI.
- Flatten your images.
- Flatten all transparancies.
- Do not use any security / password protection. The printer will not be able to print the PDF.
- Image compression should be set to ZIP if you want lossless (no artifacts/distortion-free) images. To reduce filesize, use JPEG -> High. Do not use CCITT or LZW compression. LZW compression creates multi-strip images, which may show white lines when printed.
- If you are printing a color book that has black & white images in it, the black & white images should have the colorspace set to grayscale.
- The gamma of a grayscale image should be between 2.2 and 2.4.
