Our Life in Print

The first copy of our printed weblog arrived yesterday. It was a bit of an experiment as I’d never used Blurb for printing before and I had to use a fairly convoluted method to produce the pdf for printing.

In the end it involved creating the book in Pages and then exporting it as a PDF file. Then I used Adobe Photoshop to open that PDF, rasterise each page individually and save them out as PNG files. I then used the Blurb BookSmart application to create the book complete with covers etc. and the PNG files of each page into their respective pages within BookSmart. This allowed me to send a Blurb compatible file to them for printing.

The end result was however lovely. I was going to give it to Anna as a Christmas present but couldn’t wait. The print quality is perfect. Despite the round tripping from application to application and from PDF to PNG and back to PDF again, the text is clear and crisp and the photos look just the way I want them to.

There was one error on the spine of the book that was my fault and I probably should have had slightly larger margins on the inside of facing pages, but I shall rectify these in the next edition. Overall I’m impressed. The book looks great, the service and quality from Blurb was brilliant and it’s a lovely keepsake of our ‘Simple Life of Luxury’ here in West Wales.

Here’s a preview of the book:


I’m sure no one else will want to buy it, but it is available from the Blurb Bookstore and I’ve already started on the 2006 edition.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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