[texhax] Lulu and CreateSpace formatting

[Daniel Greenhoe]

Hi Keith,

>  I assume I need to edit the book.sty file to generate PDFs
> of the required dimensions.
> But that's beyond anything I ever did before.
> So I'm looking for someone who could edit my book.sty file ...

I think the problem may be much easier than what it may appear to be.
Whoever ends up being your print house should have a user's manual
with a list of supported book sizes. Then you can simply use the
{geometry} package. In particular, you put this in the preamble
(before the \begin{document} section):
  \usepackage{geometry}

Then you can specify the dimensions you want as parameters in the
above statement or you can specify them in a separate \geometry
command.

For example, I helped a retired professor republish a book he had
coauthored years ago called "Distributive Lattices". For that book,
the desired size of the new edition was 10 inches by 7 inches. Here is
the geometry command I used:
\geometry{
  xetex,centering,twoside,includehead,nofoot,nomarginpar,
  paper=a4paper,layoutheight=10in,layoutwidth=7in,layouthoffset=16.1mm,layoutvoffset=21.5mm,
  bindingoffset=5mm,
  inner=15mm,outer=15mm,top=20mm,bottom=20mm,           % margins
  headheight=6mm,headsep=12mm,
  %showframe,showcrop
  }

If you publish through Lulu or CreateSpace, you may find that they own
the ISBN number, not you. So you may want to consider purchasing your
own ISBN number through Bowker at
  https://www.myidentifiers.com/

With your own ISBN number and a pdf file with imbedded fonts, you can
publish through Lightning Source:
  http://www.lightningsource.com/

Lightning Source is part of the Ingram Book Company, which includes
Amazon.com. So in the end, you can arrange to have your book show up
on Amazon.com's web site. Here is the "Distributive Lattices" book on
Amazon:
  www.amazon.com/dp/098380110X/

Maybe the first step is to collect all your material and combine it
into a single pdf file with embedded fonts. To check the fonts in your
pdf file, you can use Adobe Acrobat Reader
(File-->Properties-->Fonts). You can also use the pdffonts utility
from
  http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html

Dan


On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 8:46 AM, Keith Devlin <kdevlin at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I was a heavy LaTeX user in the 1980s and 90s, but since then have made much
> less use of it as my career changed. I now want to collect together a lot of
> earlier material and make it available at low cost in the form of
> print-on-demand books from Lulu and CreateSpace. Everything is in LaTeX
> 2.0.9, article.sty or book.sty, and my current editing package is Textures
> on a Mac.
>
> Lulu and CreateSpace accept PDFs (provided the fonts are fully embedded),
> and provides page size and text area parameters, but little more. Certainly
> no LaTeX style files -- they do not seem to have any support for TeX. I
> assume I need to edit the book.sty file to generate PDFs of the required
> dimensions. But that's beyond anything I ever did before. So I'm looking for
> someone who could edit my book.sty file (a customized one I was provided for
> an earlier book project) so the output has the right dimensions for Lulu.
> I'm willing to pay for this, BTW.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Keith
> ------------
> Keith Devlin
> Executive Director, H-STAR Institute
> Stanford University
> Cordura Hall
> 210 Panama Street
> Stanford, CA 94305-4115
>
> Home page: http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/
> ------------
>
>
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