How To Convert PDF to Vector [2018]

hey and thanks for stopping by today we're gonna be talking about moving a PDF file into illustrator while keeping all of the elements of the PDF and converting those into vector shapes and this is a process that typically a lot of pre-press graphic designers encounter when trying to edit documents that either a client has supplied them or a document that just needs to be changed up and sometimes the faster method is to edit a document to the point where you can change whatever you need and also ways to grab elements out of PDFs that are vector based so keeping that in mind this does not cover everything gets converted to vectors this is a tutorial specifically for vector based PDF that have already been in the background created by a vector program so that long as long as that makes sense to you we're good to go if you need more clarification please check out my youtube channel for more insights on lingo and what pre-press stuff you need to know about so moving on we're gonna go ahead and open a PDF document here and this is the San Diego Zoo I just went ahead and went online and opened it up so here we go so I downloaded this and as you can see we have a number of different text spots all over different sizes and we have a lot of different graphics inside so a normal PDF when you open an illustrator which is what we're gonna do right now when you go to illustrator and we're going to open this PDF and this is what a lot of graphic designers like myself and designers that end up in countering when they get documents from either other designers or corporations or just places that are like hey this is all we got please you know do with it what you can and he usually get stuff like this missing fonts now missing fonts have been a problem in my entire career as a pre-press graphic designer and this is one way I have found that you can take a original PDF document and take it to the point where you can use the shapes of the letters that you need for a font or maybe it's a logo that's enough font it just depends sometimes what it is that you need or maybe you just need the document just to retain its original you know elements so nothing really has changed and you can make very minor adjustments whether it be a maybe an ink level on a certain color or maybe it's a issue with just changing the color or eliminating a line out of there that's you know maybe it's being updated you know things like this are what we encounter so right now I'm just gonna hit close but it typically you know you encounter everything like this you know missing fonts missing elements you know and you're just you know kind of sick of it so this is what we're gonna do we're gonna go ahead and show you how to get past this now what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna actually open this up in to Adobe Acrobat again okay so we're gonna take a look at here are a couple ways to convert a PDF within Acrobat to allow you to gain the elements that you want while using a PDF in Illustrator so what we're gonna do first is we're gonna go ahead and edit the PDF typically we if you can't find that PDF just feel free to go to the search bar or type in edit PDF Oh hasn't finished her okay great let's see oh sorry that's fine that's here if you go to home and you type in search edit PDF alright we can see right over here on the right hand side there's the tools options that comes up and edit PDF is right there so if you need to do that that's one place to do it or if you're just looking for it's kind of like a pinkish purplish you know horizontal bar and a square and some lines so just look for that icon when you try to find this okay so now we're gonna go back home back to the zoo map the first thing we're gonna do is right here in the menu items of edit PDF you have what's called watermark okay this is obviously the piece that basically protects it from any kind of copying or issues that people you know can find out whether or not there's a watermark in it and this is how you find it so in how you go ahead and update it so we want to add a watermark so here we are and we want to go ahead and we have to put something in for watermark I like using the smallest thing possible which I believe is the star and as you can see it shows up here in the preview so here we are and we want to go ahead and we have to put something in for watermark I like using the smallest thing possible which I believe is the star and as you can see it shows up here on the preview what we're gonna do is we're going to change that size first drop it to eight because I don't think it goes any smaller well maybe four I think yeah so it's basically never gonna show up on anything and that's what we want to see the other thing we want to do is change the opacity of the watermark to 0% let's drop it all the way down and then once you've done those two things you can now hit OK okay now we've gone ahead and added the watermark the next thing we need to do is head over to you tools again and we want to go into print production print production has well crosshairs for the CMYK and a little piece of paper icon so we want to go to print production and then right over here and that's a little tool menu you want to go to flatten or preview now you're gonna click this and it's gonna automatically start flattening the file that's fine let it do that because it's part of the process it needs to do this to make sure that all the elements are being gathered in to the document so here we go all done and we just want to go ahead and keep this it's normal resolutions as it comes up so right now the section of the raster or vector balance you want to be a hundred percent you can leave the line art and text resolution at twelve hundred and then the gradient and mesh resolution at three hundred is fine so you can leave those as they are what you want to do is click right below convert all text outlines and then convert all strokes to outlines and if you already understand what that means and you know what's going to happen next now here's the thing you want to hit apply down here in the bottom first okay it'll give you a warning saying hey this can't be undone go ahead yes so it's gonna go ahead and do what you just asked it to do so right now the PDF engine is going through all the text document in the document and flat flattening it and making sure that it is in an outline mode so it converts it into essentially a vector shape at this point once you've done that you go ahead and hit OK over here on the left it's a little confusing but that's how you do it here okay great now we've done this now we want to save it okay file save as I like save as because it always allows you to make a copy we want to put this on the desktop and we just want to go to the end of the line here I'm just gonna add outline and say save now this is gonna keep everything that we just did so and we have a separate version so if there is any issues we could always go back to the original okay I'm gonna go ahead and get out of that and I'm gonna go back into Adobe Illustrator look at our old document here so if we go up here walking the zoo so we want to see this you know in the other one we want to see this all fixed so that's what we're shooting for so we're gonna hit open and right here at the top here we have our outline version I'm gonna go ahead and open and here we go and as you can tell no font issue dialog box has occurred and now you can see right under here walking the zoo the entire part completely converted back to outline mode and as you can see in wireframe you can also access anything here if you need to swap something out of something use it for some other files something else needed from it this is all ready to go now and this has also been a really great way to find elements obviously to outline text but this will also give you something to reference you can always use it as a backup so it's a really great way to keep things a little bit more stable in a print environment so you're not really worried if a font is it getting converted or outlined prior to exporting or output press you know all these things are already taken care of because it's not a not text anymore it's a flattened object so I hope this was useful and I hope that you guys like the new updated version and if you would like to hear more of this type of information please let me know in the comments below and as always have a awesome day

Channel: Black Cap Design

Views: 70,937

Keywords: how to convert to pdf, adobe, acrobat, illustrator, vector, pdf, outline, outline type, edit pdf, convert pdf to vector in illustrator, how to convert a pdf to vector in illustrator, pdf to eps ai, inskscape trace a pdf, how to make a pdf file an si file in inkscape, inkscape convert pdf to eps, invoice pdf vector in illustrator, convert image in vector, illustrator pdf to vector, adobe ai turning pdf to ai, pdf to vector

Id: 662zlLp63kA

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 31 2018