Create small versions of document pages with legible text
Jan 07, '08 07:30:03AM • Contributed by: bagelturf
When doing marketing for my PDF book (Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5), I needed high-quality page thumbnails to show what the pages looked like. I first tried taking screenshots 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 the image 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 first printed the pages I needed to a PDF file. Then, viewing the generated page in Preview, I 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. The end result is a small representation of the page with perfectly legible text.