converting sewing patterns from din a 4 to us letter

[Faye Jennifer]

Hello Adobe Community, 

I am a aspiring sewing pattern maker. I want to offer different pdf print options for my sewing patterns in A0, A1, A4 and US letter, possibliy all exported from one .ai file.

It is importand for the pdf file to have layers so singular sizes can be printed for a sewing project. 

Till now I created my project on A0 artboards, and when I save it as a .pdf I cannot change the size of the resulting pdf. 

For the A4 and the US letter format I need 1 cm of overlap so the papers can be aligned and glued. This can be archieved in the print options (scaling: Tile fill pages) but with this tiled file I have no access to the layers. 

My current workaround is changing the artbord size, creating the bazillion singular sheets I need, and use 10mm negative spacing between the artboards, to create the overlap. But while aligning the objects and artbooks I get regular Illustrator crashes. 

This process is tedious, frustrating and needs to be repeated every time when something in the pattern is changed. Also copying all the objects and paste it into a new document (with all the right artbord options in place) does not work because all layerstructure for the sizes is lost. 

I hope there is more elegant and practiocal solution I just cannot come up with myself. 

Thank you for your feedback

kind regards 

Faye

[Met1]

I'm sorry, I'm not understanding what you want to do or what problems you are encountering.

Aren't A0, A1 and A4 all proportional to one another so one file should be scalable. (Only one file to update when there's a change).

US letter is a bit of a problem so you might need to do a specific layout for it.

Again, not sure why you have to copy paste everything into a new doc, just do a save as and rename.

[Faye Jennifer]

Hi Met1,

thanks for your answer!! 

Sorry that I have made myself not clear enough. I will try again:

My goal is to have one Master file where I can export all the pdfs from (to avoid updating mistakes).

I just don`t know if this is possible or not, simply because I am not that familiar with export options in Illustrator. 

I don´t understand how I can convert the A0/A1 file into A4 while maintaining the layersystem for the sizes and the 1cm overlap. How would you do it? 

For printing sewing patterns at a A4 printer the original A0/A1 file cannot simply be sliced up into the correct amount of A4 sheets. The non printable area on the edge of the sheed could contain important sewing pattern information and therefore needs to be covered with the overlap area.

So I guess it is not scalable anymore and I just need to deal with the fact that I will have multiple files?

Kind regards 

Faye