Prepare your files for book printing

A printer will likely ask you to supply a “print ready PDF files”  and to the untrained this can seem like a daunting prospect.

If you’re looking produce print ready files yourself, our aim is to make this process as stress free as possible.

However, if you want help with laying out text or a vibrant cover design then we can recommend designers that we have worked with for a number of years with budgets to suit everyone. Please contact us for further details.

We are looking to receive print ready PDF files for both the text and the cover. Ideally these should include crop marks so that we know where to trim the files.

The text file should have at least 10mm white margins all round (unless it is a colour book – please see below) and the cover file should have 3mm bleed added all round.

It is important to remember with the inner pages, the first page starts on a right hand page, which is usually the title page.

For colour books where the image extends to the edge of the page, please add a 5mm bleed all round. Images should be a minimum of 300dpi.

A print ready PDF file is a locked file with all the fonts you have chosen and used in your text file embedded into the file which means that they cannot be changed or substituted.

Fonts vary from one computer to another, particularly from a PC to a Mac. So if you send a PDF file without the fonts being embedded it’s likely fonts will be substituted if your chosen font doesn’t exist on that machine.

If the spacing between letters on these fonts varies then all your text could rewrap itself on to new pages.

Printers insist on print ready PDF files – not just to protect themselves but also to ensure that all your hard work does not get messed up! If you need any assistance contact our team.

Here we have some word template files to get you started with laying out your text in Microsoft Word. These are already set up for the most popular standard book sizes.

They include the Title and Title Verso (also known as Copyright) pages. Font is Times New Roman, which is a popular choice, but you can change this to a font of your choice.

To ensure a quick production timing we cannot accept a Word document to print your text from. This must be converted into a print ready PDF file first.

This is easily achieved if you follow the step-by-step guides that we have put together:

• Create a print ready PDF file from Microsoft Word 2007 – click here
• Make a print ready PDF file from Microsoft Word 2010 – click here
• Create a print ready PDF file from Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac – click here