MultipagePDF is an Adobe Illustrator CSx script that imports a PDF file with multiple pages as one document with many layers, each page loading into a separate layer. The script was written as a tool to help the workflow of the Mr. Softie application, which already saved to PDFs, but needed to maintain its layer hierarchy when imported in Illustrator. Although Illustrator is capable of exporting to multi-page PDF files, it does not support importing them if they were not generated from Illustrator; the MultipagePDF script was born.
The steps of the script are fairly simple and use a few little tricks to work around the limitations of Illustrator. First, it reads the PDF file to get some information like the page size and the number of pages. Once it has the required information, it creates a new Illustrator document. Then, the little trick, it copies the PDF file to a temporary file with a different name and opens the PDF one page at a time, copying to a new PDF with a different name each time. This is done because Illustrator won't open a PDF with the same filename twice, even if we want to open a different page. For each opened page, the script creates a new layer and copies the content of the page to it.
You should make sure that the PDF you try to open does not use compression, because the script won't be able to get the information from the PDF file. Also, this script didn't appear out of thin air, a lot of it is a modification and improvement on the PDFPlacer script for InDesign.
Last update: v1.0b (March 19th, 2010)
Please email any comments or bugs to: bruno [at] wyldco [dot] com.
The steps of the script are fairly simple and use a few little tricks to work around the limitations of Illustrator. First, it reads the PDF file to get some information like the page size and the number of pages. Once it has the required information, it creates a new Illustrator document. Then, the little trick, it copies the PDF file to a temporary file with a different name and opens the PDF one page at a time, copying to a new PDF with a different name each time. This is done because Illustrator won't open a PDF with the same filename twice, even if we want to open a different page. For each opened page, the script creates a new layer and copies the content of the page to it.
You should make sure that the PDF you try to open does not use compression, because the script won't be able to get the information from the PDF file. Also, this script didn't appear out of thin air, a lot of it is a modification and improvement on the PDFPlacer script for InDesign.
Last update: v1.0b (March 19th, 2010)
Please email any comments or bugs to: bruno [at] wyldco [dot] com.
installation
Download the .jsx script and place it in the script folder of your Adobe Illustrator installation or execute it from anywhere by choosing the File > Scripts > Other Scripts menu within Adobe Illustrator.
references
PDFPlacerbruno [at] wyldco [dot] com
