Lorem Ipsum Blvd A Graphic Designers Personal Bag of Tricks

Creating a PDF action in Illustrator

If you are contently repeating the same steps it's worth this time to create an action. An action will record anything you do to a file and repeat the steps on any future files. Today I'm going to create a very simple action for saving a PDF as smallest file size on a folder on my desktop called "PDF".

First, select the actions panel. (Window>Actions) Click on the Create new action button. We'll name this action "Save PDF Smallest File Size". Hit Record.

Now the Action is recording any changes that occur to the file. You could add a copyright symbol, text, resize, or pretty much anything else repetitive you would like to do to future files. We are going to simply select save as and set out PDF settings to smallest size. Make sure you save the file within the folder you want all future files to be within. I created a desktop folder called "PDF". Once you do this you can close the file.  The Action will pick up on the closing of the file and do this to future files. After closing the file hit the stop button. This helps when you want to open 10 files and click the play button on each one and have them close as they are re-saved to PDFs.

Now you can open multiple projects and simply hit the play button to make them save as a pdf on your desktop in a folder called PDF without seeing any prompts. Creating actions of redundant tasks will save you an incredibly amount of time!