Just thought I'd update everyone on using PrinceXML with print-on-demand publishers CreateSpace and MagCloud (FYI we're still using an older version of PrinceXML (6.0 iirc).)
So far both POD publishers have accepted PrinceXML formatted PDFs
without any post-processing through Adobe Distiller or the like. All of the prints have turned out very nice. If you are looking to do print-on-demand, this is one very nice way to do it if your files are already in XHTML/XML format.
I've had similar results with Lulu but never ended up publishing with them as they were more expensive than CreateSpace and also that CreateSpace allows publishers to be listed on Amazon.com by default. I would imagine anyone that has a blog or online magazine could export their content as XHTML or write a script that would convert their documents into XHTML/XML for processing with Prince. The only additional thing that would need done is the CSS and they'd have a printed edition of their content.
MagCloud: We've printed two magazine issues formatted with nothing more than PrinceXML (Inkscape + Gimp for the cover) and ordered proofs. They look very good (at least to us!) with no printing problems that we could find. We haven't made them available to the general public as they're just too expensive @ $0.20 per page for our niche. Our "market" just won't accept purchasing a 40 page magazine for > $8/magazine. Most are ~$7/magazine (including shipping) at most and they're +60 pages.
For those that are interested, all of our PrinceXML formatted PDFs (that can also be printed by MagCloud) can be found here:
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/pdf. The free ones can be found at
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/pdf/free. If there's interest, I can make one of the magazines publically available for people to purchase through MagCloud if they want to evaluate the quality of the print for themselves. The particular PDF that I would make available would be our November 2007 issue:
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/pdf/AdvancedAquarist-2007-11.pdfCreateSpace: So far we've now published
seven books (150-250 pages each) using nothing more than PrinceXML for the PDF formatting (again, Inkscape + Gimp for the cover). CreateSpace has accepted our PDFs as-is and all of the books have turned out great! Their publication process evaluates the PDFs and alerts us to any possible publication problems. So far the only two problems that we have encountered have been that the PDFs aren't flattened to their liking and that some images are < 300 dpi. I've reviewed printed proofs of books with both these problems and have not noticed any visual problem with them at all (other than of course a couple grainy images due to their low dpi. All of our books are 100% color both inside and out btw. Using CreateSpace's "Pro" option in the publication process allows us to bring the retail cost of each book down to $25-$39 per book depending on page count which is right in line with other 100% color books in our niche.
For those that are interested, all of our PrinceXML formatted books can be found here:
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/print-editionsGeneral Comments: The only reason that we haven't used PrinceXML for the cover is that we need to clean up the cover photo (using Gimp) prior to processing it into a cover and then we use Inkscape for the cover text placement. We could use PrinceXML for this, but our cover text placement is highly dependent on the cover image itself as we don't want to cover up a main focal point of the image. We just find it easier to do the cover editing and text manipulation/placement in Inkscape followed exporting the final cover as a 300 dpi 8.5" x 10.5" .png which is then converted to .jpg before PDF creation. For MagCloud, the cover photo is part of the PDF document. For CreateSpace, the cover photo is separate from the PDF document and the final cover is created in a second book cover creation step in CreateSpace's publication workflow.
Thank you again for a wonderful product! Any questions, please let me know!
