Export for Screens as PDF saves whole canvas even when selecting single artboards!

[Eido Studio]

Hello all,

I want to create individual PDFs of artboards in an illustrator file. I’m saving for print and in the Export for Screens dialog I have selected PDF with the advanced settings set to High Quality print. I select only the artboards I want, and then save them out. All good so far - I have 4 separate files with only the artwork selected appearing when loaded on preview or with acrobat.

The trouble comes when I review the file size. They are massive. I open them up again in illustrator and find that each PDF contains the whole canvas and all the other artwork, even while the pdf is ostensibly only a single artboard! What on earth is this about? Is not the whole point of the export panel that it makes it easy to export single components from a document? And given that every other export type works as expected - png, svg, etc - saving only the selected artwork - why does this not work with PDF?

My only other option is to use ‘save as’ and save each artboard individually as a pdf. Or save them together, then split the PDF in acrobat!

But, any thoughts! Have I missed something? Has Adobe missed something?

Many thanks,

Andy

[Monika Gause]

The default for "High quality print" is "Illustrator editing capabilities" turned on. This includes the complete AI file inside each of your PDFs. You need to set up your own preset with that option turned off.

About Illustrator files: How Illustrator saves files - YouTube

[Eido Studio]

Great stuff. I’ll check this out. Thank you

[Mike_Gondek]

I did not have that issue on Mac Sierra 10.12.4. Newest Illustrator that came out a few days ago 22.1.

But my art is different, and you may have items that overlap multiple artboards, or masks where the contents go well beyond that artboard.

Below are my settings incase this helps.

[Eido Studio]

Thanks for sharing. I don’t know why you wouldn’t have the same result. But will check out Monika Gause’s solution. Best, Andy