STARWAYTOHAVENMeet The MakerFocused explanations for the structural problems that most often derail print PDFs, EPUBs, and conversion-ready DOCX manuscripts.
Understand which boundaries distributors inspect and why a visually correct PDF can still fail preflight.
Normalize the page boxes during export or with a professional PDF preflight tool, then remeasure every page.
Identify unembedded, subset, restricted, or substituted fonts before a print distributor rejects the file.
Embed licensed fonts, replace restricted fonts, and visually compare the repaired PDF at high zoom.
Trace mimetype, META-INF, OPF, manifest, spine, and resource errors in dependency order.
Repair the first structural failure, rerun EPUBCheck, and continue until errors and material warnings are resolved.
Make the table of contents, landmarks, reading order, headings, and fragment targets agree.
Rebuild navigation from the final document structure and test every target in at least two reading systems.
Remove fragile manual formatting and build a conversion-ready hierarchy with paragraph and character styles.
Apply named styles consistently, remove manual whitespace, and test a clean conversion copy.
Distinguish source pixel dimensions from effective DPI after an image is scaled on the final page.
Replace or resize only images that fall below the printer’s requirement at their final placed size.
Start with the rejection matrix, then use a repair guide to work through the correction safely.
Open the rejection matrix →