During the last few days I’ve been finishing my latest book, Microservices for everyone. I’ve used the Leanpub self-publishing platform again. I wrote about the process before and still like it very much. Every now and then Leanpub adds a useful feature to their platform too, one of which is an export functionality for downloading a print-ready PDF.

Previously I had to cut up the normal book PDF manually, so this tool saved me a lot of work. Though it’s a relatively smart tool, the resulting PDF isn’t completely print-ready for all circumstances (to be honest, that would be a bit too much to ask from any tool of course!). For example, I wanted to use this PDF file to publish the book using Amazon’s print-on-demand self-publishing service CreateSpace, but I also wanted to order some copies at a local print shop (preferably using the same source files). In this post I’d like to share some of the details of making the print-ready PDF even more print-ready, for whomever may be interested in this.