If you are designing your text and cover yourself, you will need to provide us with an Adobe PDF file (or a postscript file). PDF stands for Portable Document Format. When a file is converted to a PDF, all the fonts, formatting, colors and graphics are "locked" into place. PDFs can be made in many ways, with low quality settings (used for the web) or high quality settings (used for printing). When making a PDF, you need to ensure that fonts are embedded, and that you are using the highest quality settings available.

Adobe Acrobat is a group of programs that includes Acrobat (used to view and edit PDF files) and Distiller (used to create PDF files). Many people are familiar with Acrobat Reader, (a portion of Acrobat) which is limited to only viewing and printing PDF files.

Making a PDF is the last step in the design process. Before making it, you should be sure you have all design details taken care of for your particular project. See Cover Setup or Text Setup for specific design instructions. If you will be designing both your text and your cover, you will need to supply a single PDF file (trouble-free) for the text and a single PDF file (trouble-free) for the cover.

We do not recommend using free online PDF software or PDF utilities that are often supplied with software (PDF Maker, PDF Writer or others) as these methods often create flawed PDF files that we cannot use. We also do not recommend using any "Export to PDF" feature of any software program.

For Advanced Users:

If you are already familiar with the PDF making process using Acrobat and Distiller, download our customized joboptions file (below). If you have trouble downloading this file, please email us.

PC Users: Right-click on the following link and choose "Save Link As" or "Save Target As" from the dropdown (make sure to save it with the .joboptions extension).

Mac Users: Control-click on the following link and choose "Save Linked File As" from the dropdown.