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saving artboards as individual PDFs from Adobe Illustrator

Community Beginner ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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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. 

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Feature request , Import and export

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correct answers 3 Correct answers

Community Expert , Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

Just save the Illustrator file as .ai with the Save each artboard to a separate file option checked.

Batch rename the resulting files as .pdf (easy to do in Bridge).

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Community Expert , Feb 28, 2024 Feb 28, 2024

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.

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Community Expert , Apr 19, 2024 Apr 19, 2024

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.

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Guest
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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Moving to the Illustrator forum from Get Started

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Community Expert ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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Specify which artboard you want saved at the bottom of the Save As dialog . . .

Capture.PNG

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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that doesn't work. tried it. 

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Community Expert ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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"Doesn't work"? No one will be able to solve this with you if that's extent of your contribution.

 

In what way does it not work? What happens, or doesn't?

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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sorry. saving the artboards indivudually that way still saves the other artboards in the file along with it. So it saves artboard 2 as an individual pdf, but when you open it back up in illustrator all the other artboards are still there too. so far Ton_Frederiks has the best solution for this, that seems to be the smoothest way to get this done.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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Just save the Illustrator file as .ai with the Save each artboard to a separate file option checked.

Batch rename the resulting files as .pdf (easy to do in Bridge).

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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ok this might be my best option yet.. it at least has the fewest amount of steps. and I did not think of doing this, thanks!

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Community Expert ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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Good to hear that helped.

You may want to add your vote to this feature request:

https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-feature-requests/suggestions/32252662-ex...

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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absolutely will do! thanks!

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Community Expert ,
Feb 28, 2024 Feb 28, 2024

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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.

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Adobe Employee ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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Hi there,

 

Sorry to hear about the trouble. Please try the steps suggested above. For more information, you can also refer to this help article:

 

https://helpx.adobe.com/in/illustrator/using/creating-pdf-files.html

 

Let us know if this helps or if you need any further assistance.

 

Regards

Rishabh

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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is this a robo response? cuz this does not answer my question

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Explorer ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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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.

 

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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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.  

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Explorer ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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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.

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 06, 2020 Jan 06, 2020

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yes! exactly! it's been so frusterating! it seems like a simple thing that Illustrator should be able to do! I agree Ton_Frederiks suggestion is the most seemless solution so far, still feels like a bit of a work-around though. You would think this option would have to be built in to the program already, but it's not looking like it is. 

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Community Expert ,
Jan 07, 2020 Jan 07, 2020

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Common practice is to have Illustrator files to work on, and PDFs to hand to others. These PDFs don't necessarily need to be fully editable (certain typographical settings are indeed lost), but it surely would be nice to have separate PDFs of each artboard. That's what's available right now.

 

You want to have it all in one go: separate and correctly editable PDFs (to read back into Illustrator). That's odd, so I'm interested – why ? What kind of situation or circumstance calls for this feature ? Maybe we can come up with another or even an easier workaround...

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 07, 2020 Jan 07, 2020

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These are files I'm doing for a client, and this is how they want them. I don't know why they want the pages individually or still editable. If it were me I would just save the illustrator file and save the pdf will all the pages in one document, I'm not sure why they want the pages separated out, they are printed manuals for furniture assembly instructions so it seems like more work to me to separate pages out, but this is how they want them so I'm just trying to find a smooth way to prepare these docs how they want them. 

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New Here ,
May 23, 2023 May 23, 2023

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When Printers open the pdf in Illustrator to print the one pdf, They see all the files in the master file which can be confusing.

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Community Beginner ,
Apr 18, 2024 Apr 18, 2024

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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.

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Community Expert ,
Apr 19, 2024 Apr 19, 2024

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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.

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