Expert: Amy - 10/11/2006

Question
Hi Amy

I'm running Illustrator CS on a Mac OSX 10.4.6.  I've created my
artboard to be 14.8 cm x 21 cm (the size of the pages of the
children's book I'm formatting), and I save it as a pdf with crop
marks etc.  But when I open it in Adobe Reader, the page is now
significantly larger than 14.8 cm x 21 cm - in fact it almost fills
the A4 page!  Do you know why this is?  Is it not possible to
keep sizes the same when saving as a pdf?  I just don't
understand how the printer, who has requested the files in pdf,
is going to print it out at the correct size if conversion to pdf
resizes it like this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!  I have checked and
double-checked the size when I start and that I haven't ticked
any weird boxes in my page setup or anything.

Thanks!
Philippa

Answer
Additional info...

Hi again.  I wanted to tell you that if you change the artboard size, you need to SAVE AS a new document.

I found that when I simply changed the artboard size and saved, the new artboard size wasn't accepted.

-Amy


Hi Philippa,

You can generate PDF files two ways in Illustrator, you can print to a PDF using Acrobat Distiller (if installed on your machine) or you can SAVE as a PDF.

If you are printing to a PDF File, you can control the PDF size.You need to change the artboard size to 14.8 cm x 21 cm -AND- you need to select the SAME size for the paper size under Print Setup. If that exact size is not available, you can create a custom paper size.

It's my experience that if you create a PDF by saving as a PDF, the page size is equal to the artboard size -OR- the outermost extent of any artwork on the page. I just played around here and could not get the paper size to affect my output using this method.

The only way I got a page size larger than the artboard was
to have artwork outside the page area. Do you have any artifacts to clean up?

Since you are indicating the page size with crop marks, any good printer would examine it manually during the rip and adjust the page size then but you're right, it would be nice to supply somethng closer to the finished size.

If you would like me to look at an Illustrator file, I'd love to do that for you. Email it to me at AmyLynPace@yahoo.com  Since I use version 9, could you please Save as Legacy version 9 for me? Anything you send will remain confidential and will not be seen by anyone else but me. And my dogs.

Cheers.
Amy