More on the Lulu glitch/ Print goes back to local

Those of you following the tedious twists and turns of M-Brane's print edition will have read the post below about how my Lulu plan for print-on-demand sales of it is not working out after all just when I thought all was well.  The problem lies in the fact that for some reason their system is rendering the font called "Cambria" into gibberish. Cambria is the font for the body text of 100 percent of M-Brane.  So, clearly, this is a problem. In fact, for the moment, it's a totally unworkable problem. I'm just not going to redesign the whole thing around that only to find that some other problem has arisen, like happened during the CreateSpace nightmare. I have been advised that I can generate a PDF of M-Brane that will "embed" the Cambria font in such a way that the Lulu printer can render it correctly if I spend a couple hundred bucks on the newest Adobe package. Since that won't be happening real soon the Lulu store is closed indefinitely.  I have to say that I do not understand why I can take any old damned file, including the zine's PDFs, to any household printer sitting on anybody's desk or even a place like FedEx-Kinko's and get a perfectly fine print-out of it, but a big commercial printer that makes books for a living can't handle it. I just wonder if POD is really ready for prime time unless you are doing a very, very simply-designed document and willing to limit yourself to Arial, Helvetica and Zapf Dingbats (that's what the online Adobe converter did to it, by the way...which gives me even more pause about actually buying their program). 

So...here's the final status of the print edition until technology catches up with me: I'll have the print copies run off at the local copy-monger like back in the day (since the even the crappiest, most scurrilous printer around here can deal with Cambria) and mail them out myself.   It will be run in all black and white on the cheap paper--otherwise it would be stupidly expensive. A purchase of it will include the PDF as well, just as an extra thing to have.  I'll get the price details and order procedure added to the subscription info later today. And then I'm leaving this topic for awhile and concentrating on getting onto other electronic platforms like Kindle.

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