I discovered a neat but little-known trick in Adobe Illustrator…
At work customers often provide pdf files as “artwork”; no originating files, supporting files, or fonts. In most cases we can take that pdf, import it into ArtPro, and outline the fonts, but it’s sometimes a hassle. And there are times when I’m at home and would like to do that for a project too. And what about someone who doesn’t have ArtPro or Nexus… What’s a graphics geek to do?
A properly created pdf will have all the needed fonts embedded within the file. Acrobat can open and correctly render the fonts because Acrobat can make use of the embedded fonts. But if you open that same pdf in Illustrator, those embedded fonts are useless, and when the fonts aren’t loaded on the system, Illustrator substitutes the fonts in the file with whatever it has on hand, and text goes all over the place. Totally unacceptable.
But here’s a neat trick to get around that.
Hit OK.
That placed pdf file then gets converted to native Illustrator objects, with all of the text in the pdf file converted to outlines. Even the quirky font that you’ve never seen before becomes an editable filled path in Illustrator. If you intend to keep the content from the pdf in Illustrator, it’s likely that some of the objects may need a little tweaking, especially if the pdf file originated in QuarkXPress. When I’ve done this, gradients built with spot colors in Quark come out as numerous solid color CMYK boxes with a clipping path. Not so neat, but easily remedied.
For the record, I’ve tried this in Illustrator CS3 (v.13) and CS2 (v.12); not sure how far back it goes, but I’m guessing that it should work on any version that supports transparency; I think that was introduced in version 7 or 8. I haven’t upgraded to CS4 just yet (good God; already?!) so I don’t know for sure if it still works there, but chances are it does. It probably also works on the same products on the Windows side, but I’ve not tested it there either. YMMV.
Have fun with it!
