CorelDraw to Illustrator to InDesign

Jose Ramos

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    • June 3, 2013 at 8:52 am #33783
      Jose Ramos
      Member

      Hi: First off, great job on the Forums and website redesign!!!

      I’m having a bit of a dilemma and hope I can get your input. A client of mine exported thousands of graphics from CorelDraw to the Illustrator CS5 format. As a result, when I place these, InDesign CAN NOT see them. The image frame is there but with no preview of the image.

      Opening them in Ai and re-saving is NOT an option for me, because they are stored in many hundreds of folders and can not be moved from there to another directory.

      I’m using InDesign CS5, 5.5 and CS6

      Any suggestions? Thanks in advanced.

    • June 3, 2013 at 8:58 am #33785
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Unfortunately, InDesign cannot read AI files unless they have a PDF file embedded in them. That is why you have to turn on “embed pdf” when saving an AI file out of Illustrator.

      • June 3, 2013 at 10:06 am #33787
        Theunis De Jong
        Member

        What happens when you drop an .AI file onto the Distiller?

      • June 3, 2013 at 11:28 am #33790
        Jose Ramos
        Member

        Hello Jongware:

        Interesting indeed! Here’s what I get when dropping one of those Ai files into Distiller.
        [Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced.]

        However, if I open and save the file in Illustrator, it works fine.

      • June 3, 2013 at 11:21 am #33789
        Jose Ramos
        Member

        I forgot about that detail. And here I was trashing Corel! :)
        Thanks!
        Jose

    • June 3, 2013 at 11:36 am #33791
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      However, there are ways to batch convert AI files to PDF, I believe:

      Batch-Convert Illustrator to PDF

      Or a script:
      Batch export .ai files to pdf

      (I just did a search for batch convert in google; looks like there are likely other solutions, too.) Good luck!

      • June 3, 2013 at 11:49 am #33792
        Jose Ramos
        Member

        Thanks so much for the links, David. I’m checking them out right now!

    • June 3, 2013 at 1:19 pm #33794
      Jose Ramos
      Member

      I thought it would be good to post the final solution based on the excellent suggestions by David. And by solution I mean workaround.
      1. Use Bridge to isolate the Ai files. (Select show items from subfolders and Filter the Ai files).
      2. Select all and open in Ai.
      3. Use the Convert to PDF script and save the pdfs to a New folder
      4. InDesign: In the Links panel, select all Ai links. (Sure would be nice to be able to be able to filter the links or maybe sort all Ai files).
      5. Choose Relink to Folder command.
      6. Select Match same filename but this extension: pdf.
      7. Choose the folder you want to relink to (the one with all the newly created PDFs).
      8. Done.
      Thanks!

    • June 3, 2013 at 2:52 pm #33795
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Regarding your comment in step 4: You can do this by choosing Panel Options from the Links panel menu, turning on the Creator checkbox, and clicking OK. Now you’ll see a column labeled Creator in the top section of the Links panel. Click on the column heading and it will sort your linked images by their Creator!

    • June 4, 2013 at 11:50 am #33806
      Jose Ramos
      Member

      Yes that worked great! Thank you David.

      And just in case there’s anyone else out there facing the same problem, here’s an Illustrator Script written by Carlos Canto (exclusively for my issue) that will open any Ai file in any subfolder (drilling several levels down), save the file in Ai format with PDF preview and close it in the same location. Thanks Carlos!

      https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqlx4nfnq3iegz4/Ai2Ai.jsx

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