Save Multi-page PDFs from Illustrator

Yeah, yeah... I know. It's been a long time. What can I say? I've been wicked busy.

Okay, so maybe I ran out of things to talk about as well. Keeping up with a blog is hard work. You'd think just finding the time to do it would be the troublesome part. But man, post content is where it's at.

This post might be the beginning of a new breed of posts. Typically, I post mainly about broad topics which relate directly to graphic design and web development. However, that is very limiting. Instead, I will open it up. Allow for more tips and trick's I've discovered. Announce developments in graphic and web design that may interest readers. Pretty much anything I want to, just as long as it loosely related to design.

So how about an Adobe Illustrator tip?

I've been having issues with a specific (Windows-based) client viewing PDF files I create on my Mac. His assistant, who is on a Windows box, can view them just fine. I've yet to discover where the precise issue is, but it pretty much came down to me having to distill his files in a legacy version of Adobe Distiller 4.0. This was tedious, since it required me to boot up my G4 Sawtooth (as Xeon PowerMacs do not run classic applications) every time I needed to distill something for him. Now, the problem only exists with multi-page PDF files. Single PDF files that I can save as PDF directly from Illustrator display perfectly.

Illustrator is certainly not a page layout application. It's mainly for illustration. But there is a certain number of us out here that need multi-page support from Illustrator. It just makes things easier sometimes.

So, up until CS2, if you wanted to create multi-page PDFs from within Illustrator, you had to print to a PostScript file, then use Preview (or Distiller) to convert that to a PDF.

In CS2, Adobe added the ability to save multi-page PDFs without needing to print to PostScript. It's fairly hidden, but if you go to Save as, choose PDF as your format (click Save), then in the Save Adobe PDF dialog, click the bottom checkbox, "Create Multi-page PDF from Page Tiles."

(Let me add, you will need to visit the Print dialog box and enable "Tile Full Pages" under Setup before the Multi-page option when saving will be un-grayed).

Now, you may be wondering how this differs from the PostScript method. Well, first of all... it's a heck of a lot faster, not to mention easier. Secondly, saving this way embeds ALL fonts, not just subsets. This was the problem that my client had been having (he didn't have the necessary fonts installed). It gets extremely technical, but some time along the way, Adobe decided to embed subsets of fonts when using Distiller. This is fine, but it can lead to problem.

In the long run, I've been much happier as of late. As has my Sawtooth. It's been sleeping like a baby for about 28 days now. Every day I can go without using a classic application the better.

This has been today's clarified butter.