Ask MagCloud: Upload & Publish

All you need to publish is a MagCloud account and a PDF. Publishers who want to add a markup to their MagCloud publication's price must also have a PayPal account in order for MagCloud to pay earnings from your sales. See our Terms of Use for additional information.

You can upload a PDF up to 300MB in size if you have the Adobe Flash Player or Microsoft Silverlight installed. Without one of these plug-ins installed in your browser, the maximum file size you can upload is 200MB.

To download the Adobe Flash Player, click here.

To download Microsoft Silverlight, click here.

To replace a PDF for an existing MagCloud publication, go to the Publish tab and select Publication Tools for the publication you want to edit. Select Edit Publication from the dropdown menu. From the Edit Publication page, click the Upload a Different PDF button and follow the onscreen instructions to browse to and upload your new PDF to the existing publication. Once the file is uploaded, Preview the new PDF to ensure everything looks okay, and then don't forget to select Save Publication button at the bottom of the page.

Note: Orders placed when the prior version of the PDF was in place will not be affected; only new orders will use the new PDF. All orders will use the PDF present at the time the order is placed.

MagCloud's "Upload from Flickr" feature lets you easily turn any of your personal Flickr photo sets into an 8.25" x 10.75" Standard or Pamphlet publication without needing to use a design program to create and upload a PDF file. The tool places one photo per page, so you can create a publication with anywhere from 4 to 384 photos.

To create a MagCloud publication with the "Upload from Flickr" feature all you have to do is create a set in Flickr, go to your MagCloud Publish tab, click the "Create Publication" button, select "Import From Flickr" and authorize MagCloud to connect to your Flickr account.* MagCloud will import the photos from the set you created and lay them out automatically. You’ll also have the option to add a title and subtitle, as well as include the titles of your images and/or page numbers on each page.

*Note that you will need to have a personal Flicker account to use the "Upload from Flicker" feature

MagCloud PDFs must have all fonts embedded to ensure that our digital presses are able to reproduce them correctly in print. For information on how to embed the fonts used in your document from a variety of programs, please see the step-by-step instructions available for download on our Getting Started page.

If you believe you have correctly set your fonts to embed and are still receiving this error, it's possible that the non-embedded font occurs in an empty, hidden, or transparent text frame in your document, or that a single character within a text block uses a different font than the rest of the paragraph. Deleting text frames that are empty or hidden, and correcting those where a single character is a different font should eliminate the embedded font error message you are receiving.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, the preflight function can find these for you. Go to Advanced > Preflight > PDF Analysis, and choose the report called "List text using non-embedded fonts." This will list any instances of text that includes non-embedded fonts.

If you created the file in Adobe InDesign, before exporting the PDF go into Type > Find Font, select the non-embedded font's name, and click Find First and Find Next until one of the above mentioned cases has been found on the page mentioned in the error message. This method takes longer, but should eliminate this upload message if the offending text is found and corrected.

MagCloud only accepts PDF files. Click here to see our PDF specifications and download step-by-step instructions for creating a MagCloud-ready PDF in a variety of programs.

If you are unable to convert your file to a PDF in the program you created it in, Adobe has a subscription-based PDF converter. The tool supports a number of file types, but is a paid service.

It is possible to lock a PDF during its creation, and MagCloud cannot accept locked PDFs. If you get either of the above messages after uploading your file, check the security tab when exporting your publication as a PDF to ensure no boxes are checked requiring a password to open or edit the file. Disabling this option should allow you to upload your PDF to MagCloud without seeing either of the above messages. For more information, please see the downloadable instructions on our Getting Started page for the software you are using to create your PDF.

MagCloud enables you to publish a magazine-format publication in print or as a digital version. Print versions are available in a variety of sizes and binding options. Digital versions can be read through the MagCloud iPad application, online in the MagCloud web viewer, or as a downloaded PDF on any desktop or mobile device.

Yes, you can opt-out of digital distribution and only distribute in print.

Not at this time.