saving artboards as individual PDFs from Adobe Illustrator

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
January 6, 2020
6 replies
31314 views

ok this is driving me nuts and I figure there HAS to be a way to do this smoothly. I have a document that is multiple pages (artboards) built in illustrator. The only way I've found to save the individual artboards as PDFs was under the export for screens option and export each artboard as a PDF, I can even choose the file extension name.. great. Everything is fine with this option EXCEPT it does not keep my text paragraph in tact. It breaks them up into individual lines and looses the paragraph's editability. So I try just saving as a pdf and then extracting and saving individual pages from Adobe Reader, but this way leaves all the other artboards in the file when you bring it back to illustrator to edit. There has to be a way to simply save each artboard as its own pdf, while keeping text in tact, and not all the additional artboard information saved to each individual PDF.

Correct answer Ton Frederiks

Cleaning the file is always a good idea. But did you try the Export for Screens suggestion?

Export for Screens can do that now as well.

Create a PDF Preset that does not include PDF editing capabilities.

In the Export for Screens dialog change the settings to that PDF Preset.

L

legopants

Known Participant

The only issue with this answer, which still hasn't been fixed in 2024 is that all the previews for the seperated artwork files will have the full multi-page AI as the preview. So image making 35 versions of a Logo for client and then them not being able to see a preview... you need to open each file and resave it to get the updated preview. You can make an action etc (a good practice can be to open each file, remove unused swatches (especially helpful if you are doing logos as you might get unwated pantones etc in the file that arn't used, other things to try are removing unused styles etc) and then save. - I would love a fix for this. I think its PC only.

Ton Frederiks

Correct answer

Community Expert

Cleaning the file is always a good idea. But did you try the Export for Screens suggestion?

Export for Screens can do that now as well.

Create a PDF Preset that does not include PDF editing capabilities.

In the Export for Screens dialog change the settings to that PDF Preset.

Alex Affonso

Inspiring

Hi,

If I understood you correctly, you're trying to Export for Screens using the PDF option so you can have each artboard as a separate PDF all at once. Am I right? And each resulting PDF ends up with separeted lines of text instead of block of texts. If that's the case, I guess you need to change the settings of the PDF prior exporting because the Export for Screens option uses the Smallest File Size PDF preset as default, which results in a file that loses the Illustrator editing capabilities. In the Export for Screens dialog box you'll find an Advanced Settings button to the right of the iOS and Android titles and from there you can select PDF in the left side and choose the desired preset to be used while exporting artboards to PDFs. Try using the Illustrator Default or the High Quality Print presets since they preserve Illustrator editing capabilities. I did some tests here and the texts remain as editable blocks.

Please let me know if it works for you.

P

ParryCreativeAuthor

Participating Frequently

Yes I realized that and tried a different preset, which preserved editing capabilities, which then saved all of the artboards together for each individual file. So the option of Preserving Editing Capabilities retains my text paragraph, but it also saves all of the artboards to each individual file, and I don't want that either.

Alex Affonso

Inspiring

Yes, you're right. I also tried to open the Illustrator file into Acrobat and Extract all pages as separated ones but when I open each one back in Illustrator all artboards are there. That's very odd because each artboard should be one page only after Acrobat extraction. So yes, @Ton_Frederiks seems to have the best solution by now.