Illustrator page boxes for PDF distilling

[bhm8hwcm]

I still receive a lot of eps files from people and I go to PDF on them all. I usually open then up in Illustrator and resave out as PDF to the correct size with bleed etc. My preference is to just distill them to PDF but the page boxes do not gett recognized and so the pdf page size is set to the artwork bounding box. Trying to quickly fix/or figure out the correct sizing/positioning in Acrobat at this point so I go back and open in Illustrator.

Is there any way for distiller to recognize page boxes from AI or is this more a function of the info being saved within the eps file.

Some people do give me an eps with an outside vector bounding box set to the bleed size but not everybody does this.

 

[leonardr]

DO NOT USE DISTILLER...It is a LOSSY workflow!

Just do a File->Save As from Illustrator.

It produces a MUCH HIGHER FIDELITY PDF with all of your page boxes (and various other things) intact in the final PDF.

 

[toronar]

DO NOT USE DISTILLER...It is a LOSSY workflow!

Just do a File->Save As from Illustrator.

It produces a MUCH HIGHER FIDELITY PDF with all of your page boxes (and various other things) intact in the final PDF.

That is certainly correct Leonard, but only if the EPS in question is an Illustrator-EPS.
If the EPS was created by another application, using Distiller is the better option.

An EPS can contain a lot of stuff that makes using Illustrator a risk, e.g. different color spaces, embedded fonts that you don't have ... Distiller handles that much better

 

[bean66]

In Illustrator you can create a box the same size as you page and position it over your printed copy as desired. Then while the box is still selected, go to the Object menu, down to Crop Area an select Make. This will define the page bounding box for your PDF.