# Open PDF with Illustrator - Crashes



## jasonwood (Oct 19, 2003)

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to get a Vector graphic out of a PDF. I've tried opening the PDF with Illustrator but it crashes while importing.

In Acrobat I can select the graphic using the bounding box but that just copies a bitmap.

Is there another way to get the vector image out of the PDF? or any ideas on why my Illustrator is crashing?

Thanks!


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## MannyP Design (Jun 8, 2000)

It could be a number of things:

1) The version of Illustrator you are using may not be compatible with the version of PDF that it was made in (ie: Illustrator 7 may not be able to open an Adobe Acrobat 5 PDF);

2) Not enough RAM;

3) Copy protection could be enabled, which sometimes can cause a program to crash;

4) The PDF is corrupted;

5) A PDF created on a PC sometimes poses incompatabilities with Mac Acrobat. It's very rare but does happen.


However, if you have the Adobe Acrobat program (not the free version of Acrobat reader) you should be able to use Acrobat to export the PDF (or the page from the PDF that you want to extract the image from) as either a PostScript or EPS file. The exported PS/EPS file can then be opened in Illustrator.

Or...

if you have Adobe InDesign you may be able to import the PDF into a new InDesign project and then export the file as a .ai file.

Other than that, without knowing your setup... I can't offer any other insight.

Hope this helps.


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