Hello,
I was wondering if anyone had an advice for a good (*) low-volume
print-on-demand service in Europe(**) ?
(*) good quality, fast, cheap, extra points for having ISO B5, Crown
Quarto or equivalent paper sizes.
(**) or able to deliver to France in my case.
I hope my post won't be considered completely off-topic, since I use a
(home-built and customized) "xsltproc + DocBook XSL + FOP" toolchain to
produce manuals that we'd like to print. I think this information could
be valuable to others on this list, and I'll share my experience.
We've tried Lulu.com with mixed results : the choice of book types and
formats is good, the quality of the result is good, but the delay is not
that good. The really bad part is that sometimes we'd get a partial
delivery only some books and not others (we have multiple manuals and we
update them often). For a reason unknown at this time some PDF are not
accepted by the printer (at the Lulu.com European partner located in
Spain, it seems). It is not the (quite classic it seems) font embedding
problem (all fonts are reported by Adobe Acrobat Reader as "Embedded").
This problem is handled quite poorly by Lulu.com: you are not
automatically notified of this kind of problems, you have to notify
them about the missing book, they start a refund procedure but you have
to manual reorder the missing books. The 3-4 weeks turn-around time
between an order and a partial delivery hasn't allowed me to do any kind
of debugging, and Lulu.com currently doesn't have any details or
explanations for the problem.
Sincerely,
--
Mathias Brossard