Solution to using Aperture for ordering books from other companies?

Question

I am a professional photographer who has been using Photoshop CS3 to design and output books for Shared Ink, WHCC and others. While SharedInk does accept PDF files, they're complicated to construct in just the right format. WHCC will only accept properly-formatted JPEGs.
Of course, Aperture has its own notion of how to generate PDFs.
While Photoshop will open the pages of the PDF as individual JPEGs, it's less than optimal because the JPEGs will end up being re-compressed when they're saved, potentially impacting quality. So my objective was to somehow turn the Aperture PDF directly into JPEGs.
Well, it turns out that the JPEG files are embedded neatly into the PDFs that Aperture creates. And if you're careful, you can cleanly separate the JPEGs themselves into separate files. I found a utility that has a simple Drag & Drop interface which does just that. I haven't tested it extensively, but it worked in my very unscientific test.
So I end up with a folder of JPEG files in the highest possible quality which I can then upload directly to my lab.
Check it out at http://users.phg-online.de/tk/MOSXS/xpdf-tools-3.dmg
Caveat Emptor! "

Answer 1

StefanGson wrote:
What?
Of course a JPG can include text. Like you can insert text in a picture in photoshop. ANd then save the picture with text as a JPG.
I didn't make myself clear. JPEG files are just pixels. Of course they can contain anything. But the "text" in a JPEG file is not editable as text after it's been saved as a JPEG.
But PDF files are loose containers that can contain pixels (as JPEG, TIFF, or otherwise), text (as actual text with fonts, etc), Postscript objects (like Illustrator files), and even hyperlinks and whatnot.
The reason all this is relevant to Aperture is when Aperture outputs a book, it puts every page into a PDF. If you don't use captions or text, then the page is strictly in JPEG format within the PDF. the Xpdf program can then properly extract it.