How can I turn "pages" files into a bound book?

Hello anne17

There are a number of 'Print On Demand' publishers e.g. Lulu (www.lulu.com). Their main aim in life is to help people self-publish books i.e. make them available for purchase by the public. However, they normally allow you an option to keep your work private so that only you can buy it. I've no idea if this approach is cost-effective for your purposes. Be aware that there are issues with Pages files and Lulu, do a search on Lulu here to find out more. I've never done it but I'm sure others here have and will chime in with some more advice.

I'm not sure it will be very practical to print a book via iPhoto unless the content is almost all photos.

iPhoto has a very good yearbook template. Simply add your photos to iPhoto and select the photos and click on the 'book' icon on the toolbar. Assemble your book from there and then print it to a pdf or send it to Apple's publisher. This is really the easiest way to do it.

While I think this is cool for beginners, I personally like using Pages because I can play with the formatting more.

To make a booklet in Pages use the free CocoaBooklet. This neat app takes individual pages and imposes them in the correct order in a pdf document booklet. It is indispensable for long, extended projects.

Since pdf's are cross platform you may be able to bring a CD with the pdf into a printing company and have them bind the book for you. You can also do it yourself with Book Binding Equipment. I saw a fairly inexpensive set up at Staples.

For my booklets I have created two different custom paper sizes in my print dialogue:
Letter half (5.5x8.5)
Legal half (7x8.5)

I put my Pages docs in one of these sizes and work on the pages one at a time until I am done. Then I use CocoaBooklet to make them into a pdf booklet.

To create these custom page sizes so they are available in every doc:
1. Open Pages and select a blank doc.
2. Open the Inspector and click on the tab to the far left to open the page setup dialogue.
3. Click on the Page setup button.
4. In the top pull-down menu (Pages Attributes) select 'custom page size'.
5. Click on the 'new' button
6. Create your new custom size by entering the measurements in the boxes provided and then name the size.
7. Click o.k

Now this size will appear anytime you go to page setup.

Kurt

With a little converting magic you can quite easily do this.

First export your project to .PDF file in Pages. Open it in Preview and then re-save the .PDF file as .png files and then load them into iPhoto. Takes about 2 minutes to do.

I had to do something similar with my album art. I am a musican and I designed my booklet pages for a CD release in Pages. Exported to .PDF and then saved them as image files in Preview in order to send them off for publishing.

FWIW, there is a post on the lulu forums in the pages thread saying that converting to PDF-X rather than plain pdf in the OS X print dialog creates a lulu-friendly file. I have asked here if anyone has tried this, but got no response. It's certainly worth a try if you've got a file ready to upload.

See your other post!