Sally,

I have used Lulu only a little, so I have not explored all its 
abilities,  but it seems like it is one of the best short run publishing 
options around for self publishing or comping a publication.

1. You should include your font material in your PDF to ensure the fonts 
don't get substituted with junk you don't want.  It is possible to make 
a PDF without including font material.

2. Don't know. You should probably ask on their forums.

3. Everyone has a different idea of work flow.  You should write to the 
Lulu folks and propose a better way.

4. Spine calculation makes perfect sense.  I am not sure what your 
complaint is here.  A user calculator is doing the same thing on a 
proposed book as their file calculator is doing on than actual file.  If 
you are getting a different calculation on your actual file, then you 
need to make sure your file is paging correctly.

5. I think Lulu uses forums to answer these sorts of questions, look 
under the Community tab. I think the Lulu watches the Requests and 
Feedback Forum for suggestions.

Britt


sml wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> Hoping there are some experienced lulu.com users out there that might
> shed some light on a few questions.
>
> Through perseverance we have made lulu.com do our bidding . . . BUT . . .
>
> I'm very close to uploading my files and one piece cover design and
> have questions I can't figure out how to answer.
>
> 1. Lulu keeps talking about "embedding fonts' in the files I send. But
> if I send them PDF's what difference does it make if I do not, esp.
> for the cover which will be flatten and saved in Photoshop as a
> Photoshop PDF?
>
> 2. Why does Lulu tell you to go to some other site to translate an
> ISBN number into a bar code when they do it automatically for you when
> you start putting the single page cover together?
>
> 3.  On several occasions I could not get to the 'my project' tabs for
> cover, price etc. Then, after I downloaded all my interior files I was
> suddenly able to.  While I see some logic in that, nowhere is there an
> explanation for that apparent lock out. Observations?
>
> 4. A similar observation is that once the interior files were
> downloaded lulu appeared to automatically compute my spine width
> although until then the spine width calculator seemed to be the only
> way to do it.
>
> 5. Why is there not a contact e-mail site to ask questions like these,
> or have I missed it despite what I would characterize as diligent
> searches on my part?
>
> There's a lot that lulu.com could do to improve its online
> presentation format but there's no way to give them feedback.
>
> I wish you all and our world a Happy New Year that it will bring us
> Peace and Peace of Mind!
> Sally Thibault
>
>   

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