Publishing Advice - PDF formats for Ipad/Kindle

Posted by: Newt Newport On: May 13th 2010

I've recently jumped head first into the pdf sales world of Drivethrurpg.com/rpgnow.com.

I've uploaded e-book versions of the d101 books to the site. I've produced them by taking the print pdfs that I use at Lulu, and used the quick and dirty "Reduce File Size" in Acrobat pro, keeping compatibility at Acrobat Reader 4 onwards. Makes a 70 Mb file around 20 Mb.

Problem is I've had a chap who uses Goodreader on IPad and who has had problems seeing the images in the pdf.

Has anyone else had this problem and more importantly a solution?

Posted by: Gregor Hutton On: May 13th 2010

Hi Newt

Good question and not one that I have experience of.

I don't have an iPad (obviously, as it's not out in the UK) but I do have an iPhone and so far my PDFs are viewable on that.

I wonder if changing the workflow you've used might help. Rather than taking a Print PDF file and then optimizing it using Acrobat Pro, what if you created a web-friendly PDF direct from your source files. (The option for me in the PDF export in InDesign is "Smallest File Size" or similar.)

I'd also heard from RPGnow/DriveThru that one "issue iPad customers have already reported is that any of the PDFs where a publisher has marked the product to disallow copy & paste, such products will not open properly on the iPad's PDF viewer, including PDF reader apps like Good Reader."

It's not related to that is it?

Posted by: Newt Newport On: May 13th 2010

Nope, I've left that box unchecked.

From testing with a mate who already has an imported IPAD the issue seems to reside firmly and squarely with the fact that I've used the Reduce File size option in Acrobat Pro.

Files produced, even from the Print versions ofthe pdf, using the PDF Optimiser option, which cleans out spare markup and reduces image dpi, work :)

Reason why I've used Acrobat pro to do this, is that I don't have Indesign at work (where I tend to do my file uploads).

But next time I'll be using Indesign's native PDF exporter with 'Smallest file size'.

Cheers for the response Gregor :)