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Free
software for making postscript and PDF
files in Windows: Operating system issues: This tutorial is written for Windows users. Most of the illustrations are made with Windows 2000 and Windows 98SE. The Windows 2000 illustrations will be similar to what is found in Windows XP. Why postscript?: Postscript is a language for controlling printers. Ideally, different printers with different characteristics will produce identical or nearly identical printed documents from the same postscript file. With some attention to detail, the fonts used can be embedded in the postscript file. This makes postscript a "portable" format for uploading material to be printed by Lulu. The recommendation to authors wanting a high degree of control was to convert their document to PDF (Portable Document Format). However, Lulu's Global Distribution partner, Lightning Source, Inc. (LSI), has announced that they will only accept PDFs created by Adobe, applications. If you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat you can still create and upload a PDF for Global Distribution. If you do not have Acrobat and do not wish to purchase it, you can upload a postscript file and Lulu will convert that postscript to PDF for you. The Lulu-converted file should be compatible with LSI and still keep the fonts and formatting of your original document. Why not?: If you want your content to "bleed" you must upload that content in a single PDF of the full-bleed size. A postscript file for upload will not work. Which postscript printer driver?: I favor using Adobe's Distiller postscript driver. This is not the full Distiller. It will not produce a PDF by itself, but it will make a good Postscript file that Lulu can convert. I recommend the Distiller driver over other printer drivers because the Distiller driver is specifically designed for producing postscript intended to be converted to PDF. Obtaining and installing the Adobe postscript distiller driver Installing GSView and Ghostscript Using the postscript driver to create postscript files Using GSView/Ghostscript to convert from postscript to PDF Redistilling a previously made PDF to embed fonts |
| Copyright 2004, 2005 & 2006
by Don Campbell Last edited 06/04/2006 |