Publishing

Created: Apr 13, 2020 by Pradeep Gowda Updated: Jun 03, 2023

See also: 100-page-book

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
• lise-henry/crowbook: Converts books written in Markdown to HTML, LaTeX/PDF and EPUB
• softcover/softcover: CLI for book generation, building, and publishing to softcover.io

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.

Zines

• How to write zines with simple tools - Julia Evans

Book covers

• The 78 Best Book Covers of 2019 | Literary Hub