Print Tiling?

[Victoria25956789kqsn]

I am trying to save my artboard as a tiled pdf. In past versions of Illustrator this was pretty straight forward and I was able to edit individual pages after tiling but I am having trouble now that Illustrator can only create a .ps file vs pdf, my searches show something about using adobe distiller but I am still at a loss. I have searched on here and for youtube videos but most of the instructions I have seen are for the Ai CS5 or below. I would appreciate any guidance.  

[Ton Frederiks]

Victoria, 

Print tiling does not seem to work very well in the recent Illustrator versions and Help pages seem to describe an outdated PostScript workflow.

Dividing your work using Artboards with bleeds and using Export for Screens to export to PDF is an option, but it will take some work. When I have time tomorrow I'll try to give a detailed description.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

Here is my description of a suggested workflow.

First you need to figure out how many tiled pages you need to print the artwork at a large size.

You need to decide on a bleed size.

You will also need a PDF preset that includes Trim Marks and uses the Bleed from the document.

Create a new document.

Select a page size that you will use on your printer and subtract 2 times the bleed you want to use from the width and height.

I have chosen a horizontal A4 (297 X 210 mm) want 10 mm bleed and subtracted 20 mm from both dimensions to get 277 X 190 mm. (you may want to make a note of these sizes for future reference)

Suppose you need 4 pages to print the artwork, create 4 Artboards with 0 spacing between them and 2 rows (don't enter the bleed yet). Click OK

Choose File > Document Setup… and enter the Bleed value (in this example 10 mm) for all sides.

Create a new PDF preset.

Choose Edit > Adobe PDF Presets… select an existing preset (I did choose a High Quality Print) and click the + to create a new preset based on this one.

Give it a name such as Tiling Preset.

Uncheck: Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities (you only want to export a single artboard instead of keeping all of them in each file).

For Marks and Bleeds:

Marks: Check Trim Marks, set Offset to 0

Bleeds: Check Use Documents Bleed Settings

Paste and scale your artwork into your multiple artboards document.

Go to File > Export > Export for Screens

Select Artboards > All

Select PDF as export format

Click the cog wheel  for Advanced Export Settings, choose PDF, select your Tiling Preset and click Save Settings.

Now you can Export your Artboards.

[Lily5E25]

Hi Ton,
Thank you for the detailed tutorial. I am using it for tiling a large document I have. Do I understand correctly that I need to create the artboards using the smaller size with bleed subscracted twice? Following your example, will the artboards size be 277 X 190mm?

[Ton Frederiks]

Yes, but of course you can make the bleed smaller, which makes the artboards larger.