I’ve been writing something since January, and would like to get it printed. Lulu has consistently been highly praised to me by various people, and everything I’ve seen from then has been impressive.

This evening, I signed up with Lulu and started to put together a sample printing of a subset of what I’ve been writing. It’ll be pretty exciting to see this in print. Yes, I’ve written a few other books, but somehow writing something non-technical is an entirely new thing, and feels like my first book all over again.

So I uploaded the file, and was greeted by an unfriendly message telling me that the resulting file was no good, because it was produced in Pages on OS X. Huh? I thought PDF was a reasonably standard format. Why do they hate me?

I looked around, and found this page, which suggested all I had to do was open the file in a plain text editor, and remove the reference to Pages and to OS X. So, a few seconds with Vim, and the file was acceptable.

So what I’m wondering is whether the resulting printing will actually be ok. I mean, is there something about Pages PDF files that is intrinsically just not going to work for Lulu? Or are they just rejecting it because they don’t like Apple? Or … um … some other reason?

Anybody out there written a document in Pages, done the “export as PDF”, and then successfully printed it via Lulu? I’d love to hear from you