Creating downloadable PDFs

From MPublishing

Revision as of 10:52, 29 August 2011

Publishing partners who choose to use digital text instead of page images are often concerned that an attractive print layout is available for readers (and authors) who want to print articles. We are developing an improved CSS stylesheet for printing and mobile devices so that these will appear more attractively than if the regular screen stylesheet is used. However, aside from this, some of our publications choose to create their own PDFs of the articles and give them to us for hosting online in addition to the digital text. Doing gives you finer control over the position of figures in relation to page breaks, choice of fonts, typographic effects, etc.

You can create PDFs from the same source documents that you provide to MPublishing, which are usually in a word-processor format like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org or in a page-layout format like Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Publisher, or Apple Pages. While Mac OS X and Linux provide native PDF generation, often as a choice when printing a document, windows users will need third-party software for creating PDFs.

Instead of creating print-ready documents from scratch, you might want to use a Microsoft Word template designed for this purpose. Here are a few such templates:

• templates created by Paul Royster (listed under "Electronic publication design")
• templates from CreateSpace
• The Integrated Content Environment