Opening .pdfs in Illustrator
Hi PrintPlanet folk...
I have a job that I need to help estimate, and the designer has up picking up .pdf files from their website to work from. Unfortunately, when I open the .pdfs in Illustrator a few things happen;
1) The pages come up with an error that says some of the elements within the file are RGB, some CMYK; and Illustrator will only work in one color mode per file at a time. So I select CMYK, which leads to the possibility that what I end up with is not what the designer intended. Most designers for this kind of work (packaging) know this, and stick to CMYK while creating files;
2) Everything in the file is on one layer;
3) When I select some of the elements, Illustrator just sees a box with no color values and not the elements themselves. When deleted or moved the content (what appears on screen to be within the box boundary) disappears entirely, including pieces of background. Some shapes that appear in the “preview” mode are not even there in the “artwork” mode;
4) It appears to me that at some point these files were put through Adobe Acrobat to create the .pdfs, and that is what is causing most of the problems I’ve indicated above;
5) But, the client says that people pick up these .pdfs and use them for print all of the time;
6) I am telling them that we need are the original, layered Illustrator files that were initially used to generate the .pdfs. It makes sense that they are not available on their website; they don’t want anyone downloading their stuff and using it for anything else.
This is most of the email that I sent to our sales guy to spell it out for the client. But I am wondering, is it ME making mistakes here? Are there new Illustrator functions that I need to know about that result in such files?
PLEASE HELP! I am the only prepress person here, and I am supposed to know all of this stuff.
Thanks in Advance!
Peace to the Print Planet.
_mjnc
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