In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to create a multi-page PDF document using Adobe Illustrator. PDF files are very useful and widely used for eBooks, print / prepress and document distribution purposes. Let’s go ahead and get into the process.
Step 1
Press Ctrl+N and set up the dimensions and other settings of the artboard. Here, I am using an A4 size document / artboard with portrait orientation.
Step 2
Let’s go to Window and click on Artboards to bring up the Artboards panel. This panel makes the process very easy. Now, we don’t have to go through page tiling settings as we used to do in earlier versions of Illustrator.
Click on the New Artboard button at the bottom of the panel to create a new artboard. You can create as many artboards as you want. I’ve made 4 for the demonstration.
Step 3
Now, place your storyboards, concepts or other artwork that you want to be included in your PDF file. I have placed some text on each of the artboards according to their index.
Step 4
Go to File > Save As… or simply press Shift+Ctrl+S hotkey on your keyboard to bring up the Save As dialog. Provide a name to your file and choose Adobe PDF (*.PDF) from the Save as type drop-down.
You also have a choice to either save all the artboards or just the range of your choice. Hit the Save button when you are done.
Step 5
Inside Save Adobe PDF dialog, you can select any of the available presets depending upon the type of content you have in your file.
Since all of the artboards contain plain text objects, I don’t have to select any standard preset. Illustrator Default preset would work fine here.
You can access image sampling, fonts options, color conversion and other settings through the side panel. Click on Save PDF button when you are done.
If you are preparing a PDF for prepress/printing purposes then be careful while choosing the presets.
Step 6
Here is the PDF file with multiple pages that we have created using Illustrator. I hope you enjoyed this short tutorial and learned something new from it. See you soon with another great tutorial. Thanks!