I have not received any feedback from people who have downloaded Comixer as to whether or not PDF files created with it were acceptable to printing companies. I’m pleased to report there is finally a successful test case!

Jon D. Sloan, creator of “Sa-Bom Jim” has just assembled his first book of his web series. The book, titled “Sa-Bom Jim: A Watcher In Our Midst” is 6×9, 189 pages, grayscale, and perfect bound with a wrap-around cover. The original pages were US Letter size, but at low resolution so a smaller book size and the minimal print resolution of 150 dpi was used to make the pages look a little better in print than publishing the web images directly. Some of the pages, originally posted to his web site, were also in full color. To keep the price of the book low, though, Jon chose to convert those pages to grayscale. The colorspace conversion, page scaling, image compression, and PDF assembly were all handled automatically by Comixer! The files were accepted by Lulu and printed without any issues.

Jon’s project also exposed a bug regarding page counts higher than 100 pages and an issue with the CoverCreator that needed to be fixed – which led directly to the public release of version 0.6 and highlights how important it is to beta-test the program in real-world situations. Thanks Jon!

Jon’s book is available for purchase at his Lulu.com store page. Please consider buying it and supporting independent comic book creators.