Jutoh is principally about ebooks. But ebooks haven’t killed print books yet, and probably never will. Using a print-on-demand service such as Lulu, CreateSpace or KDP Print is a great way to see your books in print, and provide an alternative to your readers who may prefer a physical copy. Fortunately, by using Jutoh you haven’t cut yourself off from print and nor do you have to dig out the old word processor file you were using before you imported it into Jutoh and applied all those edits.
One of Jutoh’s tricks is to export your project as an OpenDocument Text (ODT) file, which you can easily open in OpenOffice, LibreOffice or even recent versions of Microsoft Word. From there, it’s a few clicks to export as PDF ready to send to your POD service.
OK, so there’s slightly more to it than that. You need to get the paper size and margins right, provide a suitable table of contents, and follow other instructions provided by the POD service.
If you look at the Jutoh help topic “Creating OpenDocument files for print and PDF”, under the topic Jutoh User Guide, you’ll find out how to set the paper size and margins, and how to set up headers and footers for different parts of your book. Mainly this involves editing the OpenDocument configuration to specify size and margins, choosing how Jutoh will deal with page layout in Project Properties / Page Layout, and (optionally) editing page styles in the Page tab of your section properties. Once you have set this up, whenever you want to create a PDF, you only have to choose the OpenDocument configuration, click Compile, click Launch to open it in a word processor, update the fields, and export to PDF.
Jutoh will generate a PDF-friendly table of contents with page numbers as well as links, if you have already created an ‘advanced’ table of contents for your project using Book | Build Table of Contents. Jutoh takes the instructions you have given Jutoh for finding headings to put in the TOC, and creates a “tableofcontents” field that it writes to the ODT file, so the word processor will rebuild the TOC when you update fields. Neat!
You can see an example of all this if you download the Jutoh book project file JutohBook.jutoh from the Book page. There are page styles for the first pages from the TOC onwards (with Roman numeral page numbers) and for the first chapter onwards (regular page numbers, with chapter headings). This project has set the project page layout mode to ‘manual’ so page layout is specified per section and not in the simplified automatic mode that gives limited header and footer styles. Plus the TOC is an ‘advanced’ one that lives in the project itself and not just generated on compilation; so Jutoh automatically replaces the whole TOC in that section with the PDF-friendly TOC.
For more details, type “print book” into the Jutoh toolbar. In particular, “KB0333: Using Jutoh and KDP to create a print book” gives step-by-step instructions.
