How to Open a PDF File in Illustrator

in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to open a PDF file in illustrator first open up illustrator we're going to go to open you can go to file open if you want and navigate to the PDF that you want to open I'm going to open up this media guide I created for Pacers gaming that's going to open up the PDF import options so first thing to know here the range is just the first page if you want to open up a specific set of pages you can change that here or if you want to open up all the pages you can click that before you click OK right now it's going to open these Pages as links for Optimal Performance it says I want to be able to edit everything in this PDF and I'm assuming you do too so I'm going to uncheck that and hit ok now it's actually going to pull in these assets and kind of rework it a little bit so we can edit it here in illustrator okay so I've got this PDF in here now the first thing it does is it creates an artboard for every page in your PDF looks like I got like nine 10 pages something like that here so I've got all these artboards generally what it does is it it just lines them all up and if it goes beyond your canvas it just keeps lining them up down below depending on how long your PDF is if you want to rearrange these what you want to do is go to your properties panel or you can press shift o for the artboard tool and in your quick actions you can rearrange all so we can decide how many columns we want let's say three columns and you can decide how this layout goes does it go left to right or just go down first then to the right to the next column also the spacing what you want to make sure is checked is move artwork with artboard you want everything on your artboard to move to the new spot hit OK and now you can see It'll rearrange my PDF so this is a little bit more manageable for me and now I can just kind of go left to right if you wanted to do just two columns and it'll just go left right left right all the way down you can do that too anyway so I've got this PDF in here I want to show you a few intricacies about working with PDF documents here in illustrator a lot of times illustrator will create groups and clipping masks depending on how it views certain elements in PDFs the other thing that's going on here is you may or may not have the fonts that are in the PDF so you might have text that's highlighted and you have to change the font Etc so there's a lot of little things but I do open up PDFs a decent amount in illustrator to try to grab Vector assets that maybe someone sent me a logo and it didn't send me the vector but they sent me like their PDF guidelines I can grab the logos out of that so there's there's some reasons to open up a PDF that hasn't necessarily been created in illustrator and you can see here everything on this page is grouped together right so the easiest way to kind of get down to the different assets in here is to right click and start to ungroup things so we ungrouped that and then I can click off and see if I can move it nope there's still another group and that's something a lot of times that happens and in fact this isn't even a group now you see instead of group we have a clipping mask so we can release that clipping mask click out and okay now we're starting to get some elements see there's a shape hidden underneath this image and that was part of the reason that it kind of created this clipping group once you release all these groups and release all the clipping groups you can start to edit these items individually you might notice a couple other things this for instance was created in InDesign exported as a PDF and then now imported here and it did not keep the paragraph text so this text each line of it is just a line that I would have to edit like this so just keep that in mind as you're working with PDFs look it's not perfect but you can open it you can make edits if you wanted to you could recreate text boxes it just kind of depends on how much you're trying to get into this document and edit different things but that is how to open PDFs edit them release clipping masks and groups most everything on your page is going to be in some kind of group so just right click it ungroup you might have to right click it again release clipping mask and there may even be more objects as you dive deep down into this document that you need to release the clipping mask for to actually get to them if you have any questions hit me up in the comments down below

Channel: Pixel & Bracket Illustrator Tutorials

Views: 24,101

Keywords: pixel and bracket, illustrator, illustrator tutorial, illustrator tutorials for beginners, how to open pdf files in illustrator, how to open a pdf file in illustrator, illustrator open pdf, illustrator open pdf files, illustrator open .pdf, how to open .pdf in illustrator

Id: FqIHLe0Ov-0

Length: 4min 6sec (246 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022