What it means
A print-ready PDF (or press-ready) is a PDF prepared so that a printer needs to do nothing but print it. In practice that means: every font embedded; images at 300 dpi at their printed size; bleed of 0.125 in where anything runs to the edge, with the trim box set; pages at the exact trim size, one page per PDF page for the interior (not spreads); the cover as a separate wrap file; colours in the printer's expected space; no crop marks or colour bars unless asked; and no security settings, layers or comments.
PDF/X is the ISO family of standards that formalises this. PDF/X-1a (2001) is the strict one — CMYK and spot colours only, no transparency, everything embedded. PDF/X-4 allows live transparency and ICC-managed colour and is what most modern workflows target. Layout tools export both directly.
Print-on-demand services publish their own checklists, and their upload preflight will reject anything that fails.
In Bindery
Bindery produces printer-validated PDFs; the watermarked proof is always free, and the clean print-ready PDF (plus EPUB) is $49 once per book or included with Bindery Pro.
Make the book, not the checklist
Describe a book or upload a manuscript. Bindery writes with you, typesets in LaTeX, sizes the spine from the real page count and produces printer-validated files — the watermarked proof is always free.
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