Book printing - Unique Workflows? - Cross-Posted from Aperture forum

Question

(Cross-posted. I think this post might be of interest to iPhoto users as well)
I am exploring the book printing features in Aperture. My goal was to build the book in Aperture and get this into iPhoto so that I could use MyPublisher to print the book. MyPublisher currently has a 50% off coupon for orders over $50. iPhoto needs their plugin to upload to MyPublisher instead of Apple when the BuyBook button is chosen. (code is MAC2550 - good though Dec 31). The design features in Aperture are rudimentary at best. It's simple to customize the design for photo placement, adding and deleting photos, resizing, etc. The type design features are not simple to customize, though. However, with patience a suitable design can be made. You can add and delete text boxes at will but these will always default to the template's built in style. I continually had to reformat the type by right clicking on the selected text and applying my preferred style. One trick when cutting and pasting text is to place the cursor one letter in from the beginning of a preformatted line, select the remaining text and paste - this will pick up the current style rather than default to the template default. Then delete the leftover first character of the line. From Aperture I printed the book to PDF, being sure to choose letter size and borderless paper option. Once book is printed to PDF I opened in Acrobat and "saved as" to PNG. In the PNG options I chose 600ppi (the default of 300ppi might have been just fine for quality, not sure). Saving to PNG creates an individual file for each page. In testing Apple's Preview software for this I found it would make a nice PNG - but of just one page at a time. I then imported all PNG pages into iPhoto. Within iPhoto create a book. I used "Modern Lines" with double sided pages. To create the cover (it's actually a label that is adhered to the linen hard cover book) I had to import the actual cover photo used in Aperture to recreate a new design based on the "Modern Lines" template. I then recreated my pages using the template. The key step being to assign the single photo page design for each page. For each page I dropped in the corresponding PNG file which included all type and images created previously in Aperture. One minor point when adjusting the placed PNG images in the iPhoto template is the option to fit photo to frame size (an option when right clicking on the photo). When fit photo is selected the image gets resized very slightly. I opted not to use this feature as I thought the resizing might compromise quality. I then clicked on the "buy book" button and the file was assembled and sent to MyPublisher. Since I had the 50% coupon I opted for the leather bound book option and ordered two 24 page books for $53.74 which included $9.98 standard FedEx fee. As for quality I'll have to wait and see. I'll post back once books are in hand.

Answer 1

It is important to realize there are two aspects to an index.
1) Topics
2) Page References
Topics have no relation to the text of the actual document. Topics can
be imported from one InDesign document to another. Also, creating topics
from a list of text is trivial. Just type all the words (or place them
from a text document or Word doc) and then press Ctrl+A to select all of
them and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+[, then delete the text.
Page references, however are not as simple. These have to be created at
each place in the text where you want the page to be referenced it the
index. This *can* in fact be done Word if you are using the text from
the Word document.
What you really have to watch out for is that when you want to create a
page reference you have the "Reference" radio button selected in the
index panel. Otherwise you will just be creating a topic. It is best to
work with hidden characters turned on so you can see and make sure
InDesign created an index marker in the text after you created your page
reference.