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PDF Services Provide Big Bonus for Aperture Users
You may have missed that the "Save as PDF" button has changed to a PDF pop-up menu in the Print dialog box for the Book tool. There are a few things going on here, many of which I'll cover in next week's podcast with Joe Schorr. But to help you prepare for that show, I want to spend a couple minutes with PDF Services right now.
The PDF Services folder is located in the Library at the root level. Inside that folder are a handful of Automator workflows that you can tap directly from the Book tool in Aperture 2.1. Little goodies such as, "Save PDF to folder as JPEG" offer you a whole new set of goodies.
It's especially powerful now because the book making tools have been beefed up. Essentially what you have is a layout program that enables you to design custom pages with your images embedded, then output them just about anyway you can imagine. You want a series of photos with the captions on the images themselves for a slideshow? No problem. Design the pages in the Book tool, then use PDF Services to output the individual pages to JPEGs.
You can grab additional workflows from www.apple.com/applescript/aperture, such as "Render PDF as Images to Keynote." And if that wasn't cool enough, you can open these workflows in Automator, adjust them to taste, then save as new workflows... and they will appear in your PDF pop-up menu with the others.
More on this in next week's podcast. I thought you might want to play a bit this weekend first.



Derrick,
I need some help. I just discovered the "save as PDF" button the other day. This is exciting for me because I now know that I can design layouts and save them as JPEGs and send them to outside album vendors. So the other night I put a book together and clicked on "save pdf to folder as jpeg" It processed all 28 pages of the book then asked me where to save it. I chose a folder and only pages 23-28 showed up in the folder. I have since tried it 300 different times, been on every forum, asked questions on every forum but nobody can help me. I even got into the automator actions under pdf services, but didn't see anything that looked like it could be a problem. After several failed attempts, I decided to see if I could save pdf to folder as TIFF, and I did successfully. There is some sort of a problem here, and it is greater than anything I can figure out on my own. I know for a fact that I am doing everything right, I am confident there is something going on within the system. Any ideas? Thanks in advance for any help.