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