Saving a PDF-compatible AI file

The topic of this chapter is Sharing. And you hear people talk about sharing their files quite a bit. I don't really dig that term too much just because it somehow implies that you are doing the world a favor. As if somehow you're giving somebody else half your cookie, where really you're doing yourself a favor, you're getting your files out there. So after spending all that time creating a highly intricate vector-based illustration or design you want to be able to repurpose its six ways to Sunday, just as I'm doing with this file right here.

It's called Ghost Robot assets II.ai, found inside the 12_exporting folder. And you may wonder what's so two about it? Well, this is that version of the document that contains the bleed boundary and the print dialog box settings and all the other changes that we applied in the previous chapter. However, I've got two versions of the file here for you. One has live type with all those special fonts, Birch and News Gothic and Adobe Caslon Pro. If you don't have those fonts available to you, you can open this document right here, it's called Ghost Robot outlines II.ai, found inside that same 12_exporting folder.

And in this case all the text has been converted to path outlines. Anyway I am going to switch back to the assets II.ai file. And in this exercise we are going to explore the incredibly flexible nature of the .AI file format. Which allows you, by the way, to create files that can be opened on anybody's system for free, using a free application called Adobe Reader. So let me demonstrate how that works. But before we do it, by the way, it's very important that we annotate this file with metadata.

Because otherwise we put the file out there and nobody knows who created it. So you've got to go ahead and mark your files, put in the author information, put in the copyright information, add a description, what have you. So I'll go up to the File menu and choose the File Info command or press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+I, Cmd+ Shift+Option+I on the Mac. And I'll enter the Author info which is me of course, and my Author Title any day of the week is trainer in a box. And you know what, I'm the only author I don't need a semicolon, thank you very much.

And the Description of this file is, he's a ghost, he's a robot. What is he? Fair enough! I'm going to go ahead and change the Copyright Status to Copyrighted. And we will enter that special character here on the PC, press and hold Alt to dial-in 0, 1, 6, 9 on the Numeric Keypad, release the Alt key. And then I'll see a list of the various copyright statements that I have entered in the past. I'll select 2060 Type & Graphics, Inc. given the futuristic nature of this document, after all the publication isn't actually do out until 2174.

And then my website of course is deke.com, come visit early and often. Alright, I'll go ahead and click OK. Now this file is ready to go. And I'll go to the File menu. In this case I could just choose the Save command to update this illustration because it already is a .AI file with PDF compatibility. However, I want to demonstrate how that works, so I'll choose Save As. And I'll go ahead and name this file with PDF right there, that is Ghost Robot with PDF.ai. Then I'll click on the Save button and I'll get this warning right here that's telling me this interesting thing about my spot colors.

So you may recall that I changed all these lilac colored elements here on the second Artboard and the third and fourth artboards as well. I changed them to the spot color Pantone 266C. And there is some transparency mixed in with that spot color. Mostly what I'm doing is I'm mixing the spot color with black, not so much with the other inks. But what Illustrator is saying is, when spot colors are used for transparency, which is happening inside of this document, changing them to process colors outside of Illustrator.

Meaning that I would have to use another application other than Illustrator to convert that spot color Pantone 266C to CMYK equivalents, in which case by the way, I'm much better doing that inside of Illustrator before I take the .AI file into a different application, but fair enough. If you do that outside of Illustrator it can generate unexpected results. Well, unexpected results is pretty vague, makes it sound like, I don't know maybe the file could blow up or something. Really the results are pretty darn expected, worst-case scenario an element could drop out.

But that's not very likely. What's more likely is your colors are going change, which is entirely predictable because you can't represent that spot color with CMYK, not altogether at any rate. And so you are going to see a little bit of shifting where that color is concerned, which is altogether expected. Anyway, what I would recommend you do is turn on the Don't Show Again checkbox and then click Continue. But in my case I am just going to click the Continue button. There is no sense on earth in clicking Cancel. Then you just wouldn't save the file which would be lunacy.

I'll go ahead and set the version to Illustrator CS5. After all I want to make sure to save all of my artboards and everything else that's going on inside the illustration. What's more important for purposes of this exercise is that you turn on Create PDF Compatible File. That will go ahead and embed the portable document format information into the file, which is essential if you are going to take this file into another application such as InDesign. It's also essential if you want to be able to open the file inside of the free Adobe Reader. Now the Adobe Reader is available for free at Adobe.com, just go there, you'll see it right there on the front page, takes about 15 minutes to download and install.

And that way your client, your art direct,r or your friends, your family members, doesn't matter, any of those people can actually open up your .AI files and take a look at them in detail. They can zoom in on them as well, and they don't even need your fonts. This is one of the most amazing things, is that all those special fonts that I am using, Birch and News Gothic and Adobe Caslon Pro, those aren't going to be on my client's machine for sure. And yet they'll be able to see the text just fine as if they had the font, because a subset of those font definitions will be built into the PDF description of the file.

Now that doesn't do Illustrator any good, but it works with Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat and the other PDF file readers out there. By the way this does make your file larger. So embedding PDF information does make it larger, but what's really interesting here is this option is available going way, way back even back to Illustrator 10, which of course if we'd selected that file format we'd lose our artboards and a lot of other stuff actually. So it's not a good idea, but this is a pretty darn old and wonderful option. I'll go ahead and click OK in order to save off that file, and I'll wait for my file to update.

I just want to make sure that it entirely saves. Now I can see the new title Ghost Robot with PDF.ai, and it's now ready for me to open inside the Adobe Reader, which I will do in the very next exercise.