Anyone using Xara for creating books?

**raynerj1** · 06 September 2007, 10:36 PM

It is always best to check with your printer before you send them anything. They can tell you which format it is easiest (thus cheapest) to setup for them. The exact dimentions for any type of page, be it a business card up to a map size.

There is allot to concider when doing a book. How many pages it will be, what type of paper and how it is bound affect the size of the page used. For example, 10 pages printed on telephone book type paper will be much thinner than on 110Lb index card stock. The outside sheets have to be wider than the inside sheets to account for the fold. There are just so many pages you can fold into a booket depending on the thickness. Best to double check with your printer before you start throwing all the parts together. That is... if you want a quality product.

keep your color plates limited... Running a full color magazine can bust your budget real quick.

**Albacore** · 07 September 2007, 08:53 AM

Kurt to answer Derek question first about converting to shapes before exporting and not relying on the filter to do the job. I have had a few instances when text appears on the left handside of a drawing while the majority has been where it should have been, so to stop that happening I make sure.

Kurt I would really stress John's remarks that you talk to your printer before you produce the whole book. You can save huge amounts of money by doing certain things yourself and you will have more control on how the book looks. John has mention a few of them but there are loads more so do some investigation on the net first that when you talk to a printer you have some understanding of the jargon used. It is a two way conversation so don't let the printer bully you into doing something that may compromise the look of the book but don't sit on a fence at some suggestions as they can save you money. They're loads of printers on the net who print book very cheaply but I am reluctant to use them out of suspicion and lack of knowledge of their output as I now trust the printer I use.

**handrawn** · 07 September 2007, 09:25 AM

I can only add - I do what I'm told when it comes to commercial printing, which I know relatively little about.

The final product is the printed page in this instance - not the image on the screen - so I let the guys that know how to do that define how I layout and export the file to pdf

**Kurt8** · 10 September 2007, 12:43 PM

Hello again,

I just got the finished book back from the printer and it came out just as I wanted. Xara just makes it so easy to move text, images and graphics around that it seemed perfect for short projects like this. I was not mistaken. I find that Xara increases creativity when working on book projects. With the addition of multi-page layouts in PRO, each page is like a fresh canvas. Here are a few final thoughts that I wanted to share with other Xara users though. I am in no way criticizing the program and am absolutely impressed with the way Xara handled this project:

1. It sure would be nice to have spell checking within Xara. I know this has been discussed before, but it is really something that almost kept me from using Xara on this project. Spelling accuracy was of utmost importance and I'm just not a good proofreader. I got around it by copying and pasting all text into Thunderbird and doing the spell check there. This could be quite complex for longer texts and invites one to make mistakes. Some people might suggest just doing all text work in Word from the start and then copying into Xara, but again I find that I am more creative if I "create" everything in Xara from the start.

2. I am no Xara master for sure so maybe I'm missing something, but I was not able to insert guidelines that worked across multiple pages. I needed vertical guides 100 pixels in from both sides of the A5 page. I had to insert the guides manually for each of the 15 pages of my book. Maybe I'm missing something here but it sure would be nice to insert guides once and have them continue down the multiple pages. Possible???

3. I imported all of my images as 300dpi Tiffs tweaked in Photoshop in advance and image quality was superb. I did a few image cutouts using Xara's Shape Editor Tool (thanks for the great tutorial video Egg) and when I exported the final book to PDF I noticed that the images that I cut out had a bit of a jagged edge in the PDF. I did a forum search to see if I did anything wrong and came up with some answers that it might be the viewing quality in the PDF viewer (I use the Foxit viewer). I was still a bit concerned when I went to the printer, but the final book showed no jagged edges on the cutout images.

4. In general my colors seem to be a bit off from my screen. To tell you the truth, I didn't make any adjustments for color while working or during my export. I'm not unhappy with the way they turned out, but maybe I should have made some sort of color tweak before exporting? Any thoughts?

5. The PDF export was clean and an accurate representation of the file on my Xara screen. I used the Commercial Printer export option.

6. I converted all text to editable shapes as instructed above. No problems with fonts in the finished book.

I'm looking forward to more books in Xara. I wish all of my software was this easy and inspiring to use.

Thanks again for all the help here.

Kurt

**Albacore** · 10 September 2007, 01:12 PM

Nice to hear back from "happy campers". Really glad that everything went well for you, seems the only thing you've got to do is to get your monitor calibrated for your work and that is not that hard to do. Do a search in Google and ignore all the software ones being sold like Spyder & Pantone they are just far too expensive for the casual user as they are many tutorials giving info on how to get a good approx. that you can set up. On the spell checker front do what everybody else does and copy and pate in from Word.

**raynerj1** · 10 September 2007, 01:41 PM

Hi Kurt,

I have found that guidelines are best laid down on the first page before anything else is added, then just copy that page and you will have it the way you need.

**Kurt8** · 10 September 2007, 04:44 PM

John,

Does this also work with multi-page documents? When I select "Insert new blank page" is there any way to select a copied page (with guidelines in place as you suggested) or maybe a template page instead of just a "blank page"? This is something that I thought would make things easier while working on this project but could not figure out.

Kurt

**raynerj1** · 10 September 2007, 10:00 PM

There is a button on the button pallet called insert new page. That does what I was suggesting... There is also edit=>pages=>duplicate current page. Either of those should work.

I am not sure if I added the insert new page button, or it is part of the standard tool bar. But that is where I find my button.