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See also:
Working with conditional content in the Jutoh manual
Creating OpenDocument files for print and PDF in the Jutoh manual
You can use Jutoh to create the content for your print books (using print on demand services) as well as your ebooks. You will need to master a few new Jutoh features, but they aren't difficult. This topic is geared towards print on demand via KDP, but can equally apply to other print on demand services.
In this topic, we assume that the project is already divided into sensible sections (title page, chapters, copyright, and so on) and formatted properly using named styles for headings, body text and so on.
Although the KDP web app may suggest that you use the already-uploaded ebook content to create a print book, reusing it without change would create a very poor print book, so you need to adapt your Jutoh project and upload the book content separately, as a PDF. You don't need to create a new Jutoh project for this if you are prepared to use some conditional formatting to allow you to simply select a configuration and compile the appropriate ebook or print book. This means you don't have to synchronize any content edits across different projects.
Creating PDFs with Jutoh works best when using LibreOffice. This is a free download and works with Windows, Linux and Mac, so grab a copy if you haven't already.
Here are the main steps involved in preparing your book for print.
You can create a new configuration in the second page of the Help with Print on Demand wizard (available from the Format | Book menu). It will initialise the configuration with suitable defaults, and also set 'exclude tags' in other configurations to print to exclude any print-specific documents. To do this manually, follow the instructions below.
You need to create a special configuration that will output an OpenDocument (ODT) file. You could just use the OpenDocument configuration if it's already been created in your project, but it may be better to create one that is explicitly for creating a print book. Go to the configurations page of your project properties by clicking Edit next to the current configuration in the control panel (bottom left of the Jutoh window).
Now either click on the OpenDocument configuration and rename it by clicking on the edit button (a notepad and pencil icon); or click the "+" button to create a new OpenDocument configuration. You could call it KDP Print, for example. Choose Initialise with defaults for this format and select OpenDocument.
Now let's set some properties.
In the Book file name property, change %FILENAME% to %FILENAME%_Print so the generated ODT file will be distinguished from any other ODT file for this project.
Search for Generate cover and clear this option, since you will need to supply wrap-around artwork for the cover separately.
Search for Generate URLs and clear this option, to prevent underlining and colour from being added to hyperlinks.
Search for Add blank paragraphs for Word and clear this option, since we are generating for LibreOffice and we don't need the blank paragraphs at the end of sections that Word needs.
Search for Exclude sections matching tags, and type no-print into this. This will allow you to tag ebook-only sections so they do not appear in the print book. (Note that no-print is an arbitrary name and you could use another, so long as you use it consistently.)
Similarly, set Exclude content matching tags to no-print in case you wish to mark portions of text as ebook-only.
In your non-print configurations (such as Epub and Kindle), set Exclude sections matching tags and Exclude content matching tags to print. This will let you exclude any sections and text that are marked with print.
Amazon offers advice on selecting a book ('trim') size. For the sake of argument, we'll assume that you are using the popular US Trade size (6" x 9" or 15.24 cm x 22.86 cm). We will also assume you do not have images that should bleed to the edge of the page - if you do, add 3 mm to the width and 6 mm to the height.
You also need to set the margins. Recommended minimum margins are listed by Amazon - 6.4 mm for non-bleed books, and 9.4 mm for books with bleed. You may wish to experiment and increase the margin size. A better margin size is 15 mm.
Now comes a slightly tricky bit - adding the gutter to the margins. The gutter is the extra margin at the inside edge of a page that gives space for the binding. The gutter encompasses the space on both pages (i.e. twice the amount for a single page). Amazon gives a table for what the gutter size should be for a given number of pages, since the fatter the book, the bigger the gutter needs to be. Obviously variations in gutter size changes the page count, so you need to estimate the page count by compiling the ODT file and opening it in LibreOffice (see below) and possibly adjust the gutter size later.
To specify the gutter size in Jutoh (and LibreOffice), you add half of the gutter size to the left margin. So let's say your book is 200 pages long. Amazon suggests a gutter size of 12.7 mm, so you need to add half of that to the left margin: 6.35 mm + 15 mm = 21.35 mm.
You will also need to enable Mirror margins so that the left-hand margin value is used for the right-hand margin on alternate pages.
So, edit your configuration, and set these values:
Left margin: 21.35
Right margin: 15
Top margin: 15
Bottom margin: 15
Mirror margins: enabled
By only setting page size and margins in your configuration, and not in your page styles (see below), you could in theory have multiple configurations for different print book sizes.
You may wish to add front matter (the pages before the first chapter) that is more suited to a print book. Here are some example sections you might add, or format differently, in the print version:
a half title page - just the title, as the first page inside the cover;
a short description of the book and/or author on the first page before the title page;
a copyright page;
a dedication page.
Search online for "front matter print book" for more suggestions.
Create these as separate sections so that you can apply unique page styles to them and ensure they start on the correct left or right-hand page.
Set the tags for these sections as print, by right-clicking over each section in the project outline and clicking Properties, and then entering the tag name into the Tags field. Mark any other sections you wish to omit from the print book with no-print.
For sections that you wish to be in both print books and e-books, don't set a tag.
If your book is a novel, you may choose to omit the table of contents even though you have one in the ebook. Edit your configuration and clear Generate table of contents, and if you are using an advanced table of contents (the TOC is visible within the project) you can set its Tags field to no-print as above.
If you have hyperlinks to other sections, for example in the title page, you may wish to have an alternate print-only section that doesn't have links, since they will be redundant in the print book. Or, you could mark a paragraph or text fragment with a condition object with a no-print tag to remove it in the print book. For more on how to do that, please see Working with conditional content in the Jutoh manual. Clearing the configuration option Generate URLs will remove hyperlinks, but in some cases this will make a nonsense of the surrounding content (for example, "click here"), requiring adjustment of the content.
Note that if you have decorative images that you don't wish to appear in the print book, and they are consistently formatted with a unique paragraph style, you can simply add the paragraph style name to the configuration option Paragraphs to exclude, and the images will be omitted.
As well as having different pages for print and ebook, you will probably want to change your paragraph styles. This is an occasion where a consistent set of named styles wins - you can just adjust a few styles for print. If you have used direct formatting throughout your book instead, it will be difficult to reformat.
If you will use different fonts, line spacing and other adjustments, the best thing to do is create a new style sheet that will be used only for this configuration. Click Edit on the toolbar to show the Project Properties dialog, then click Styles. Click the "+" button and type a new name, such as Print Style Sheet. Choose Default Style Sheet (or whatever your regular style sheet is called) in the Copy from field.
Now click on the Configurations page (still in the Project Properties dialog), and ensure your print configuration is selected. Type Style sheet into the search field at the bottom. Now choose your new style sheet, e.g. Print Style Sheet, and click OK.
Nothing will appear to have changed in your content, but you can now edit styles (for example from the Formatting Palette by right-clicking over styles and choosing Edit) and only the print style sheet will be affected.
Here are some of the aspects you may wish to change:
Typeface. It's common to choose a serif font for body text, and perhaps sans-serif or other slightly fancy font for headings and the title page. Times New Roman is considered too compact for print books, so try Garamond. You can search online for advice on fonts to use. You can keep your font changes to a minimum if your paragraph styles inherit from Normal and your styles only specify fonts where there's a difference from the basic font - so if your Body Text styles inherit from Normal, you can set just the font for Normal. Then you can set a different font for headings and title text if you wish. Note that your fonts must be installed on your computer for creating an ODT and PDF: any embedded fonts in your project will be ignored.
Text size. 12 pt is usual, but you might choose a smaller or larger size according to the typeface you are using or whether you are creating a large print book.
Line spacing. For an ebook, line spacing is best omitted because the ereader software will choose a suitable line spacing. But for print, you may choose to increase the line spacing slightly for readability: for example 1.1 or 1.2 spacing.
Heading paragraph spacing. While a lot of blank space in an ebook can be a bit irritating, it's common to have a fair bit of spacing around a heading in a print book. So you can adjust the after-paragraph or before-paragraph spacing of your heading styles if you wish, specifying, say, 200 tenths of a mm.
Page styles are only used when creating an OpenDocument file for printing or PDF production. They let you specify numbering and headers and footers for different sections of your book. Optionally, you can specify the paper size and margin sizes - these will usually be the same throughout and Jutoh will use the configuration values if they are not specified in the page style.
Once you have defined a set of page styles, you can edit book section properties to assign a page style to the section. For example, you can set different page styles for title page, copyright page, table of contents, chapters, and back matter. You don't have to assign a page style for every single chapter since you can tell Jutoh to simply repeat the style for the following sections.
The simplest way of creating and assigning page styles is to use the command Format | Book | Help with Print on Demand. The Print on demand wizard in the Jutoh manual will create a set of default page styles and guess the initial page style assignments. You can see a list of book sections and the assigned page styles, and you can change and edit these.
You can compile your book and test the styles in LibreOffice from within the wizard, or you can close the wizard and compile and test as normal. You can also edit your page styles from the project properties dialog (Page Layout panel) and from the document properties dialog.
To force a section to start on the right-hand page, you can add a page break to a blank paragraph at the end of a previous section if you can be sure that the previous section ends on a right-hand page. A page break at the end of a section will force a blank page since a section always starts on a new page. Or, you can specify that your section should start on a right-hand page by setting the page style's Layout field to Right only. Then, in the Print on Demand wizard (or in the Page Layout Style Properties dialog), set the Next pages style, to specify how the section should be formatted from the second page. Commonly, you might set the First page style to Chapter First Page, and the next pages style to Chapter. However, you might decide to save paper and simply avoid having the first page of a chapter always starting on a right-hand page.
Note that when editing or print-previewing your book in LibreOffice, it may not show automatically-added blank pages when using two page styles for a section as above. But you can tell by the position of the wider margin (with gutter) whether the page is a left-hand or right-hand page.
Each page style defines three optional headers and footers: you can create a header or footer for the first page, the left-hand page, or both/right-hand pages. The Header and Footer tabs of the Page Layout Style Properties dialog show a preview of the currently-selected header or footer, with the option to edit it in a separate dialog.
When editing a header or footer, right-click (or control-click on Mac) to show a menu for inserting special fields and other operations. To insert a field that will show the current page number, use Insert | Fields | Field and then choose Page number. To insert the current chapter name, use Insert | Fields | Field and then choose Chapter.
If you have a table of contents, you may wish to set the numbering style in your TOC page style to "i,ii,iii" so that numbering is shown differently from the numbering in the chapters.
For more information on using page styles, please see Creating OpenDocument files for print and PDF in the Jutoh manual.
With your print configuration selected, click Compile and then Launch. If your ODT file does not launch automatically in LibreOffice, you can run LibreOffice Writer and open the document, which has an ODT extension. If you have already opened your book in LibreOffice, you will need to close the ODT document before you can compile it again, or you will get an error message.
In LibreOffice, make sure any fields (such as a table of contents) are updated by using the command Tools | Update | Update All. Then use the command File | Export As PDF.
In the PDF Options dialog, adjust these settings:
Check Lossless compression
Check Export automatically inserted blank pages
Check Archive PDF/A-1a (ISO 19005-1) (this ensures fonts are embedded)
Clear Reduce image resolution
Now click Export.
KDP expects a wrap-around cover (front, spine and back) in PDF format. Jutoh doesn't offer any help with this process so here are some suggestions:
Use Amazon's web-based cover designer. This is a quick and simple route, but unfortunately it's also very limited since you can't add new text or image areas - you're stuck with those in the template.
Download a template from Amazon (PNG or PDF) and use design or paint software to design your cover elements around the areas marked in the template. Applications include Inkscape (free), Paint.NET (free), Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and Canva - a web-based cover design app.
Commission a cover from one of many excellent designers you can find online.
You can check that your content PDF looks good by previewing it and printing out a few pages - for example, the front matter, part of a chapter, and the back matter. This will help you get a better idea of whether the chosen font and spacing choices make for comfortable reading on paper.
In your KDP book details, fill out the extra details for print books and upload your content PDF and cover PDF. Once it's live, you can order author copies at the cost of printing plus shipping.
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