saving artboards as individual PDFs from Adobe Illustrator

[ParryCreative]

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. 

[Guest]

Moving to the Illustrator forum from Get Started

[John Mensinger]

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

[ParryCreative]

that doesn't work. tried it. 

[John Mensinger]

"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?

[ParryCreative]

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.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

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).

[ParryCreative]

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!

[Ton Frederiks]

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...

[ParryCreative]

absolutely will do! thanks!

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

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.

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

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

[ParryCreative]

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

[Alex Affonso]

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.

[ParryCreative]

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]

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.

[ParryCreative]

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. 

[Peter Villevoye]

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...

[ParryCreative]

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. 

[shanee42097908]

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.

[legopants]

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 · Accepted solution]

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.