Opening a PDF in Illustrator and the artwork not in the centre of the artboard.

[Charles Robey]

Opening a PDF in Illustrator and the artwork not in the centre of the artboard.

Not sure how to stop this from happening as I do a lot of work that needs to be printed and I have to open the PDF in illustator that was sent from a customer and sometimes I need to edit it. This can be annoying when I have a 80 plus page manual to re-centre each page on an artboard.

I have tried to google answers but I can't find anything

[Monika Gause]

Can you perhaps show that?

[Charles Robey]

Hope this helps

[Charles Robey]

Might be a better pic here. It always seems to move off the page when opened 

[Monika Gause]

So what is this file? Just a PDF? Or a PDF with an embedded AI file?

What happens when opening? Do you get the PDF options?

And in Acrobat this looks correct?

[Ton Frederiks]

Illustrator is not a PDF editor, but if you must, you may be able to select all (make sure everything is unlocked) and use the down arow key or the Transform panel to nudge them into the correct position.

[Bobby Henderson]

What application is the customer using to create their documents?

You might be able to tell by opening the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and checking the document's Properties (in an empty area on the page right-click and select Properties from the fly-out menu). In the Description tab it will tell what application was used to generate the PDF. This step usually works unless the person was using a third party tool to create the PDF.

Either way, if a customer wants you to make edits within a multi-page document it would be far better, faster and more accurate to do those edits using the original document file in its native, host application rather than making edits to an exported PDF. For example, if they used InDesign to create the document they should send you an .INDD file (and package of related assets).