sujato
commented
2 years ago I have tried to fix the problem with the cover image. Not as easy as I thought!
It seems to be to do with flattening the transparency in the image. There are a few suggestions here:
The only methods that I can get to solve the problem involve rasterizing the image, which has the side effect of meaning there are no fonts embedded. This is probably the best way so far:
pdf2ps orig.pdf - | ps2pdf - flattened.pdfWhich results in:
It's a good image quality. I can, however, see the image artifacts in the text at a high zoom level. I am not sure if this will affect the perceived cover quality.
You can get a similar result using GIMP.
The pdftk and gs options did not flatten the image.
I feel like we should be able to say "flatten images, not fonts". But so far I have not found anything to do this.
I also tried manually adding the background color to the imported png image, then creating the pdf. But strangely, this ended up with the imported image having a different background color, even though it uses the same HTML color code.
Attempting to print via Lulu, I discovered two bugs in the cover templates.
[x] The bleed is insufficient. It seems to be a rounding error. Probably making the bleed on the paperback config .125in will solve this.
The cover image has an ugly tint in the background. It looks fine in the supplied PDF, but somehow Lulu's processing messes it up. See #139
Here is the "print-ready" file from Lulu with these bugs visible.
y2zdpz_DRAFT_print_cover.pdf