Expert: Amy - 2/13/2010

Question
Hi Amy. I am needing to send a book to the printer, 40 pages of a4, and unfortunatly I only have photoshop and illustrator. How can I send these to the printer so that the printer doesnt have to open up each pages separately?

Answer
Hi Melanie,

I would need to know exactly what version of Illustrator you have.

Short answer is that you can't do this without Illustrator CS4, Acrobat Pro or InDesign or at the very least, the PDF print driver.

You didn't mention your version of Illustrator, but if it is CS4, you can set up your document with multiple page tile areas and then Save as a multiple page PDF. Older versions of Illustrator won't allow this, though. This is a YouTube video with nice instructions for doing this in CS4. It has great instructions but there is no audio - I hope you can follow it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uodtgSlH5hs

If you do not have Illustrator CS4 or Acrobat Pro (the full version, not Reader), the best thing to do would be to save all of the pages as single page PDF format, using the "High Quality Print" preset in Illustrator, then give them to the printer and their prepress staff will make it into spreads.

If you do have the full version of Acrobat, you can generate 40 PDFs from Illustrator and combine them into one PDF. It doesn't sound like you have the full version, so I won't dwell on it.

Let me know what versions you have.
-Amy