Resources:
- Affinity Publisher Template & Beginner’s Guide by Nathanaël Roux
- OneBookShelf Publisher Service: Book Printing
- Affinity Publisher by Serif
Nathanaël Roux’s Affinity Template meets the vast majority of layout requirements for DMsGuild print-on-demand (POD). The only change required was a slight move of the page numbers to fit within the safe zone. If you’re a beginner and looking to use a template, then you should definitely check out the Affinity Template. Additionally, Nathanaël plans to update the template to resolve the page number positions so that the templates are fully POD-compliant.
If you’re using Nathanaël’s template, you can skip over everything until the Adding Bookmarks and Exporting to PDF sections. Optionally, you can add the safe zone rectangles or guides, just to be fully aware of the zones (see Safe Zones section).
If there’s a conflict between the OneBookShelf (OBS) POD requirements and any information within this article, you should adhere to the official OBS POD requirements.
Document Setup
Settings for your Affinity Publisher document setup are:
- DPI: 300
- Layout:
- Facing Pages: Yes/Checked
- Start on: Right
(You can start on left if you’re making a POD only book, but starting on Right allows you to use the same template for both POD and PDF, I’ll explain more later. Page 1 is the cover page for PDF, and its not exported for POD.)
- Color:
- Color Format: CMYK/8
- Color Profile: SWOP (Coated)
- Bleed:
- Inner: 0
- Top: 0.125 in
- Outer: 0.125 in
- Bottom: 0.125
Spread Setup
Typically, most documents are Letter (ANSI A) page size. If you want to use another page size, check the OBS POD requirements to make sure it’s a supported page size.
Safe Zones
All of your written content (and important graphics) should be within the Safe Zones. There are two zones to be aware of: text safe and image safe. The text safe zone is 0.5 in from each page edge. The image safe zone is 0.25 inches from each page edge.
I recommend editing your Master to have guides at each of these zones, so that it’s easy to see as you are working on your layout. Additionally, I added colored rectangles with borders so that the zones were easy to see while I worked on my layout. (Remember to toggle off any rectangle layers before export!)
Additional Document Setup
I highly recommend using the column grid setup so that you can ensure each of your text frames are properly aligned throughout your document. Open the Guide Manager (located under View menu) and if you are using a standard two column layout, change the Columns to “2”. For Nathanaël’s template, enter a Gutter of “0.333 in” and Rows of “1.” This will draw gray columns on your pages where you can snap your text frames to ensure consistent columns. Additionally, you can enable 2 rows, if you are creating a 4 panel per page layout. The gray (or whichever color you select) column colors do not show in “Preview” mode.
Lastly, I also added a “DRAFT” diagonal watermark text in my Master document so that I can easily toggle it on and off for exports.
Adding PDF Bookmarks (Publisher Bug)
(This only applies to non-POD PDFs. Your POD PDF doesn’t need bookmarks). Currently in Affinity Publisher 1.7.1, you cannot export PDF bookmarks. To add your own bookmarks you can use the free FoxIt PDF Reader, which allows you to simply right click on a page and enter a bookmark name, or you can script the PDF bookmark insertions.
As someone who exports often, adding the bookmarks using FoxIt became a hassle, so I choose to script the bookmark insertions. There’s several open source and free products which allow this.
I found PDF Labs which allows me to write a batch file to add my bookmarks from a text file. This becomes a hassle if you are still moving sections around in your document, but once the layout has finalized you can save the bookmark names and page numbers in a text file and just run the command to insert them into your PDF. Additionally, if you don’t want to type the file, you could use FoxIt to create a PDF with all of the bookmarks, then use PDF Labs to export those bookmarks to a file and then use that same file to add the bookmarks into any newly exported PDF files.
If this is confusing, you can usually find me (or other experts) in the DMsGuild Creative Lounge Discord server or the DM’s Guild Creator’s Circle (Facebook)
Exporting to PDF (Publisher Bug)
If you’ve included your Cover image as page 1, do not export page 1. The exported PDF should begin with the first right-side page, then page 2 and 3 will be the first two-page spread. Your exported PDF should also be an even number of pages in either multiple of 2 or 4, depending on format and page count as specified by the OBS POD requirements. However, the last page is reserved by Lightning, so it should be blank (page will be deleted by the printer tech) or not included in the final PDF (but it still counts as a page for divisible by 2 or 4 requirement) so the printer tech can add their required final page.
- Raster DPI: 300
- Area: ALL SPREADS (current bug with exporting ALL PAGES, see below)
- Pages: X-Y (where X is not cover page, see above, and Y is not the back cover)
- Include Bleed: Yes/Checked
- Rasterize: Unsupported properties
- Use DPI: 300
- Compatibility: Final compatibility should be x-1a or x-3. However, due to a bug in Publisher 1.7.1, I recommend exporting to version 1.5 or 1.4 and then converting to x-1a or x-3 in Acrobat Pro.
- Color space: CMYK
- ICC Profile: SWOP (Coated), 20%, GCR, Medium
- Embed ICC profile: NO
- Honor spot colors: NO
- Include printer marks: NO
- Embed fonts: All Fonts (if you have at least 1 CID font, then select “Text as Curves”)
Warning: Currently in Affinity Publisher version 1.7.1, there is a bug affecting documents with a 0″ inner (gutter) bleed. Our requirements need a 0″ inner bleed. Thus, we cannot export “ALL PAGES.” Instead, we must export “ALL SPREADS” and then crop the left vs right pages down the middle to create a 0″ bleed.
The 0″ Bleed Workaround Acrobat Pro Technique
- Export to PDF with “ALL SPREADS” using above settings
- Create a duplicate\copy file with file explorer
- Open Acrobat Pro
- With original file opened, select “Organize Pages”
- Click “Insert” and select “from file”
- Select the duplicate file and choose “insert after”
- Place the page spreads into their correct orders, such that you have two duplicate page spreads for each page (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3,…)
- Select “Edit”
- Select “Crop”
- On first page spread, select the left hand side of the image, double click on selection. For the cropping RIGHT, enter half of the spread length which should equal your page width + bleed (for a 8.5″ wide page with bleed, this would be 8.625″)
- Set page range to “All” and “apply to” to “odd pages”
- The odd (left) pages should be correctly cropped. Pages 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. should look correct now.
- Go to next uncropped page spread, select the right hand side of the page, double click on selection. For cropping LEFT, enter the same width as the previous step.
- Set page range to “All,” and “apply to” to “even pages”
- The even (right) pages should be correctly cropped. Pages 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. should look correct now. Additionally, the entire book should look correct.
- Look at each page to make sure the page order did not get jumbled around during the insert and organization.
Alternately, I used Microsoft C# and ITextSharp (v5.5) to create an executable which cuts page spreads in half and saves it to a new PDF. This takes a few seconds and there’s no chance of me making a mistake in the page re-ordering using Acrobat. You can view and download the .NET executable at https://github.com/jamesewelch/pdf-cut-spreads.
Creating a Cover
Follow the exact steps as presented in the OBS POD requirements. You will need an image editor that can open PDF files in order to create a compliant PDF cover (unless you have InDesign, if so, why are you reading this document?).
When you open the PDF template, be sure to immediately change the color profile to CMYK (preferably the official CMYK color profile) before you begin to add your artworks.