I write books, which I self-publish through Amazon KDP as both printed books and e-books. For the printed books, the preferred format to upload is a PDF. However, to ensure that the printed product will look like your PDF, unless the only fonts used are Times New Roman and Arial it is recommended to embed the fonts, in case whatever system KDP uses to print doesn't have your fonts installed.
TextMaker includes the capability to export directly to PDF. Using that option allows embedding of fonts.
When working in other programs (such as Windows Paint or another program I use to generate the covers), however, there is no internal function to export to PDF so the way to create a PDF file is to print to a virtual printer. FlexiPDF installs a virtual PDF printer when the program is installed. When setting up to print to the FlexiPDF printer, I do not see any option to embed fonts (or to NOT embed fonts).
Does the FlexiPDF virtual printer embed fonts by default? If not, is there a way to instruct it to do so?
Font embedding?
Re: Font embedding?
Why not save the cover as an image file, import that into your TextMaker manuscript and create a PDF for the whole thing from there?
Re: Font embedding?
That's possible, but it's a work-around that requires additional steps that should not be necessary.
Even the freeware virtual printer doPDF has allowed embedding fonts, for at least as far back as version 7 (which was when I began using it). They are now up to version 11.7.367, so font embedding is not exactly new. As far back as Acrobat 9, Adobe's virtual printer allowed embedding fonts as a separate option, as well as creating to the PDF/A standard (which also embeds fonts). TextMaker's export to PDF allows these same options. If FlexiPDF is being marketed as a complete PDF editor, it should support this function without requiring cumbersome work-arounds.
Re: Font embedding?
I'm bringing this back because I just realized that the answer I gave before is only part of the answer.
The more compelling reason for not importing the cover image into the manuscript is that both Amazon KDP and Barnes and Noble press require the cover to be uploaded separately from the book body. This is for print-on-demand books, not for Kindle or EPUB books, which can optionally include the cover as part of the book file. For print, the cover file must be a separate file. It also has to be a very exact page size, so trying to import an image into a word processor file with the exact page size and then get the spine to line up exactly where it belongs would be essentiually impossible.
Last edited by Woody44 on Sat Feb 10, 2024 4:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Font embedding?
I see. When the cover must be uploaded separately, my solution doesn't work.