Updated With Eleven New Articles

I have updated Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5 with eleven new Aperture articles that were published on the blog between the second edition and the release of Aperture 2.0. For full details of the changes see the Publication History page.

If you have purchased the book, you will have received an email with a download link that is good for 5 downloads or one year, whichever comes first. Just use that link and it will download this new release.

If you have not purchased the book, then I'm afraid it is no longer available. Aperture 2.0 changed so much of the interface and features (and fixed so many problems!) that much of the material in the book is now unnecessary, incorrect, or misleading, especially to beginners. All the material in the book remains freely available on this site. If you really want a copy, then let me know. If there is enough demand I will reintroduce it for sale at a reduced price.

I am also interested to know what kind of information you would want to see in a future Bagelturf publication about Aperture or anything else.

Tags: Get Your Head Around Aperture, Aperture, Books, PDF, Updates

I discovered that all the graphics in my PDF book were fuzzy if I viewed it on Leopard using Preview. Here is a screen capture of a 400 x 400 pixel area:

Using Safari to view the same page, again at 400 x 400 pixels gave me this instead:

The graphic is sharp, as I remember it on Tiger. So what is going on? Something is making Preview scale the image up and the resampling is introducing blur.

The answer is that Preview on Leopard has an extra PDF preference that is enabled by default: Respect screen DPI for scale, so even if I display at Actual Size, it's not pixel-for pixel on most screens. Once that preference is unchecked, the pages showed exactly the same way as before:

Tiger's Preview does not have this option:

And so I never have the problem on Tiger.

Update: Tiger does have the option to respect image DPI under the Images tab:

on Leopard the same option is there, and adds screen DPI as well:

But these older settings apply to images, not PDFs. And Tiger only applies image DPI, not screen DPI.

Tags: Preview, PDF, Leopard

While publishing my book Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5 I figured out how to create high-quality page thumbnails like the one above. It is almost possible to read the body text, and the small blue title is certainly readable: Importing Images From A Single Folder, even though the characters are tiny. The word Images is only 5 by 19 pixels.

I first tried taking screen shots and reducing the images in Photoshop, but that resulted in a horrible loss of detail and a very fuzzy look. The page size reduction was being carried out as though it were a photograph, not a page of text. I needed a way of maintaining the character information through the size reduction.

To create the high quality page thumbnails I printed the pages I needed to a PDF file:

Then viewing the generated page in Preview, reduced the page size until it was what I needed:

Since the PDF was being rendered at the reduced size, the detail was still present. Last, I took a screenshot with SnapzPro2 and added a thin border and drop shadow with the media inspector in RapidWeaver:

This also gives me an image with the drop shadow rendered in: I just click and drag the image from the published web page to my desktop.

Tags: Thumbnails, PDF, Get Your Head Around Aperture, Books, Documentation, RapidWeaver, Screen Shots, Photoshop