Publishing

Lulu specific notes

Using LaTex to publish a novel on Lulu.

Fixing Embedded fonts error

When you are trying to publish a book via Lulu.com, you might encounter “embed fonts” error. This is the workaround I found on the web that uses ghostscript:

gs -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
 -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer \
 -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true \
 -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile=new.pdf -f old.pdf

See also: Embed fonts in a PDF with pdflatex which shows a simpler technique:

pdf2ps doc.pdf
ps2pdf13 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress doc.ps doc2.pdf

However, the resulting PDF looks fuzzier than the original one.

Resizing all pages of a PDF to a common size

This can happen if you are combining multiple PDF documents (say using pdftk) to make a compendium. You can resize all the pages to be of the same size using ghostscript — source:

gs -o /path/to/resized.pdf
   -sDEVICE=pdfwrite
   -dPDFFitPage
   -r300x300
   -g2550x3300
   /path/to/original.pdf

Cropping PDFs

PDFCrop

Self publishing tools

The Tools I Use to Write Books | Hacker News

Manning

Writing a Technical Book for Manning | Tune The Web

Libraries

PrinceXML
Speedata Publisher to generate reports. XML→PDF. Uses LuaTeX. AGPL/Commercial license.
PreTeXt An authoring and publishing system for authors of textbooks, research articles, and monographs, especially in STEM disciplines. The best of DocBook, LaTeX, and HTML. Outputs: print, PDF, web, EPUB, Jupyter Notebooks, braille,. github; XML based syntax.

Web publishing

HTMLBook “an HTML replacement to Docbook”
Bookiza Abelone “The book reification framework for the web.” See example.
ONCE — Writebook
Printing the web, part 2: HTML and CSS for printing books using modern print CSS and PrinceXML.

Zines

How to write zines with simple tools - Julia Evans

Book covers

The 78 Best Book Covers of 2019 | Literary Hub

btbytes.com