• Adobe Illustrator

  Slow Illustrator CS3 Multi-Page PDF Export + Alternative Solutions

  Posted by Paul Smith on July 8, 2009 at 3:34 pm

  Hello everyone,

  I have a recurring job that requires 50-60+ small illustrations be placed into a few different layouts. The workflow I have set up right now is as follows: All of the illustrations are drawn in one Illustrator CS3 file with multiple page tiles. This file is exported as a multi-page PDF and placed in InDesign layouts. One main problem with this system is that it takes a long time to export 60+ page tiles from Illustrator.

  I’m totally open to any alternative workflow solutions or recommendations someone might suggest, but there are a few reasons why I’ve chosen the multi-page PDF approach. The Illustrations share global swatches and symbols and graphic styles and sometimes these items need to be tweaked. Editing everything in one file is faster than opening, changing, and saving 50-60 individual Illustrator files. My client often needs me to make alterations to the illustrations, and sometimes these Illustrations appear on more than one page and in different layouts. Using the one multi-page PDF helps everything stay nice and consistent across every layout and every page.

  If anyone has any suggestions for how to speed up the Illustration export or alternative workflow recommendations, I’d love to discuss them.

  Thanks!

  Paul Smith replied 16 years, 11 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Vincent Rosati

  July 11, 2009 at 2:47 pm

  A 60+ page layout is a heavy load. Depending in the content, I start to feel the pain at about 20 pages.
  I really don’t have any ideas, other that More Power. A bunch of RAM, a bunch of scratch disks, minimized system fonts and a font management app, multi-core processor.

  Perhaps there’s something you could do with the Delete/Add/Replace Pages function in Acrobat Pro.
  You’d have your master AI file, and a master PDF. When you make a change to the AI file, only export the needed page as a PDF than you could replace the page in Actobat Pro.

  Just some ideas.?

  Vince
• 

  Paul Smith

  July 13, 2009 at 10:01 pm

  Hi Vincent,

  Thanks for taking time to reply. Unfortunately there do not appear to be many solutions. CS4 has the option of multiple art boards, which looks promising. For the time being I am considering breaking the files into smaller groups, despite having shared graphic styles and global swatches.

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