Book Cover

[parahandy]

I have been asked to produce a book cover for a book which will be published privately the drawing format I should imagine is fairly straightforward but what format would a publisher/printer expect as regards colour management . Would the graphics etc I have produced in the sample be acceptable done entirely in Xara XtremePropro. I wonder if anyone of you has experience in this sort of thing. Your help/comments on this would be greatly appreciated.

[gwpriester]

If you export to PDF/X format the color and file format should be perfectly acceptable to a printer or publisher. And the color will be in CMYK color space.

Gary

[sallybode]

On the book cover, you can ask the printer/publisher what they need, because they will print past the edge by a certain amount, this measurement is called "bleed" and needs to be added outside the final trim so that the book cover trims without an annoying white edge in places.

For print most printers want images of no less than 300 dpi, and all text converted to curves though with .pdf they can work with that as text. If you are using transparency in any part, the .pdf process may not faithfully reproduce the result so you may want to make a bitmap out of any special effects. Plugins fall in this category too sometimes. Print a sample to your own desktop printer, as it will give you a fairly good representation of your final output color. If you convert anything to a bitmap in your artwork, be sure you tell it to use 300 dpi as well.

That sure is a handsome man on the back cover.

[parahandy]

Thank you both Gary and Sally for your adviceand quick response. I do not fully understand it all I am a wee bit thick learning new tricks but I will try to follow your advice. If I get stuck I am sure you won't mind me coming back on this. By the way Sally I note what you say on transparency, does this apply to feathering?.
..........Norman.


Ok all understood now I was able to export in commercial print I tried to do it with the .xar file but gotan error which locked up computer but when I tried it with .jpg it accepted it in .pdf

[David O'Neil]

Norman:

I would recommend that one of the first steps would be to ask the publisher what they want. I have ran into one case of a publisher specifically asking for an RGB PDF. They claimed that if you supplied them a CMYK PDF, they would convert it to their type of CMYK, and this would degrade the your original CMYK, and not print as you expected it to. I don't believe they knew what they were doing, but regardless, in that case I got the cover designed in CMYK, saved as RGB, and then sent them the RGB PDF with good results.

I believe the answer to your feathering question is 'feathering will probably not come through a PDF file correctly unless you flatten it, just as transparency doesn't work as you expect unless you flatten it.' But I may be wrong, as Gary's second response in this thread indicates that feathering comes across correctly in a PDF file.

In my case, I used Xara to post-process the artists completed design from a PhotoShop file into a single large JPG file, so all the effects were 'flattened.' It was a large file (almost 10 Meg), but it worked well, and the text was 'crisp.' (It was at 600dpi.) This got around *all* the file format and effects problems not coming through correctly.

Best wishes,
David

[parahandy]

Thank you for the info David.

[David O'Neil]

I should have mentioned that after I converted it to a JPG, I then converted the JPG to a PDF file that only contained the JPG. I just redid it at 100% instead of 97% quality, and the size shot up to 23 Meg, which I've heard is still acceptable.

[parahandy]

I seemed to have got off lightly it's only 996k when converted

[Sigmation]

I have been asked to produce a book cover for a book which will be published privately the drawing format I should imagine is fairly straightforward but what format would a publisher/printer expect as regards colour management . Would the graphics etc I have produced in the sample be acceptable done entirely in Xara XtremePropro. I wonder if anyone of you has experience in this sort of thing. Your help/comments on this would be greatly appreciated.

Hello Parahandy
Take advice from the printer. A recent experience, my first, was that the printer who was using a four colour printing process needed the graphics to be in CMYK, the trial print with the images in RGB were well off the mark.
If the cover is to be one colour I would suggest that you don't have the dark lines down the spine. The book finisher needs to have a tolerance when they glue the book into the cover.
Just my two pennyworth.

[parahandy]

Thank you Sigmaton I will be getting on touch with the printer your tuppence worth is welcome.