How to Save Artboards to PDFs in Illustrator

Artboards in Illustrator are the print areas of your workspace, similar to pages in Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Word.When you export your files from Illustrator, you will export them as artboards.

PDF stands for'portable document format.' Exporting your artboards as PDF is useful when saving files that don't need to be modified. A PDF document is easily shared and printed, whichisuseful for presentations, calendars, or invites, for example.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to save your artboards to PDFs to be ready for sharing or printing. We are going to be using fall gnome SVG files to demonstrate how to do this.

Step 1 - Create Your Artboards and Designs

Firstly, when you open up Illustrator, you are presented with your new document settings. Here you can name, resize, change orientation and select how many artboards you would like in your document. When you have changed your settings, click Create.

Open your Artboards panel by selecting Window > Artboards.

Then select the new artboard icon at the bottom of the Artboards panel. We added two new artboards to the existing artboard.

Now, create your designs within each artboard.

Step 2 - Rename Your Artboards in the Top Toolbar

To help keep things organized, it is good practice to rename your artboards. It will help to know which design is on which artboard when exporting as a PDF. Start by selecting the Artboard Tool in your left toolbar, then select your first artboard. You will see the artboard values in the top toolbar. You can edit all of the settings for the selected artboard here. Select the name box and type a new namefor your first artboard here.

As you change the names of the artboards, the artboard labels will change to the new names. Also, notice that each artboard is numbered. These numbers represent the order in which your artboards will print and export.

Step 3 - Reorder Your Artboards in the Artboards Panel

If you would like to reorder your artboards so that your designs fall in a different order in your PDF, select the Artboards panel from the right toolbar.

In the Artboards panel, you will see all of your artboards listed with their number and the names you have just given them. You can click and drag the individual artboards to reorder them for your PDF. The numbers in the corners of your artboards will change to correspond with the new order.

Step 4 - Save Your Artboards to PDF

When you are happy with your design, naming, and order of artboards, you are ready to save your artboards to a PDF. Select File > Save As.

This will open the save settings where you can change the Save As settings.In the Format drop-down menu, select PDF. You can also change the range. The range represents your artboards. If you only want to print the first two artboards, for example, you can type in ‘1-2’. If needed, change the name of your file and the folder location to save the file. When you are happy with the settings, click Save.

Another popup will appear where you can change the Save Adobe PDF settings. Here you can select Illustrator Defaultin the Adobe PDF Preset drop-down menu and then clickSave PDF.

Now, when you locate and open your PDFfrom your filing system, the artboards will appear in your desired order.

Next up, check out our other Illustrator tutorials on how to batch export files, how to make a triangle in Illustrator, and how to type on a path.