Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 7/9/2008

Question
My question regards creating a multiple page PDF in Illustrator. I have read both the answers concerning it on this website and also the Illustrator Help menu but niether seems clear to me. If I want to create multiple page PDF in Illustrator do I open all the pages I want to add to the pdf? At what point can I access the other pages so that there is more than one file in the pdf? When I select the tiling option nothing comes up. I am very confused.

Answer
Hi Mike,

To create a multiple page PDF from Illustrator, you will need to open each document and save them each individually out as single PDF files.

Then in Acrobat Professional (not Reader), you can combine them together into one multiple page document. In the thumbnail pages side bar, there is a pull down menu. Choose "insert pages" and choose your other documents.

Illustrator cannot combine documents into one PDF file.

If this is a larger document and you are trying to create PDFs from page tiling, you will have to use the cropping command to create manual tiled images when you export. An easier way would be to import this into InDesign, which can create PDFs natively from both multiple page documents or larger tiled files. No need to combine in Acrobat.

Thanks

Kevin