I'm ready to send in a children's picture book to CreateSpace for printing and I have a question about my file format. Createspace says layers should be flattened in the software that created them. I have about thirty pages of color illustrations I created in Painter, Paintshop Pro and CorelDrawX7. I'm also using CorelDraw for the actual book. Because I used three different programs to create the illustrations, it's going to be difficult (time consuming) to flatten the layers that way. If I convert all my illustrations which reside in my CorelDraw book to 300 dpi bitmap, is that the same as flattening the layers? I'm using the "Publish to PDF" option in CD. I notice that after converting my illustration to bitmap my pdf file is much larger. Thank you for your help.
Walt
Flattening layers refers to vectors and images that contain transparency. If for any reason you have doubts whether a vector of image has transparency or if you know it has transparency you can follow these steps.
Open your Corel file save as and rename the file. Any vector or image that you're unsure about in terms of transparency simply draw a paths around, remove the outline from the path, select the object and the path and convert to a CMYK image at 300 DPI. In some cases you may not need to draw a path around the objects, it it's already contained with in one, like a rectangle, square, circle.
Do this for all suspect objects and images and publish to PDF using press settings, marks and bleeds per you printers specifications.
David and Ariel, thank you for your replies. David, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but I will give it a try. These illustrations have a lot of individual images and include transparencies. I received the following message from CreateSpace:
I checked this with their on-line digital version. The bleed and colors are fine. One of the fonts did not work. These illustrations were done with all Corel software - no Adobe stuff. I don't understand how there could be images less than 200 dpi in there. I will fix the font issue, try David's method (as far as I understand it), and resubmit.