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I have an artboard in illustrator that contains the cover for a book. It has the front cover, back cover, and spine, all in a single artboard, with bleed, so that I can print to PDF and send that PDF to the printer.

But I also need to export some parts of that artboard independently. I need to export the front cover and the spine at the very least, with no bleed, as PNGs, to be used in the ebook and other marketing material.

I could do it manually, but is there a way to automate this? Is there a way to generate regions of an artwork that would be exported as separate PNGs? I explored the asset export but I can't figure out how to export an area instead of an object.

For reference, this is what the artboard looks like:

enter image description here

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Create a new artboard for each section. Artboards can overlap or lie on top of one another.

You don't need to change the artwork at all.

Create a new artboard (on top of the existing artboard you already have) which encompasses the cover area, one for the spine area, and one for the back cover area.

File ends up having 4 artboards. Export whichever one you need.

enter image description here

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  • And that is why they are called arboards and not pages.
    – joojaa
    Jun 17, 2022 at 9:28
  • Is there a way to not have the red lines of the bleed go through the design constantly?
    – Pablo Fernandez
    Jun 17, 2022 at 10:08
  • @pupeno, took me a while to understand what you meant. Had to set up a document in Illustrator. I'm unsure if you can do anything other than just disabling bleed in Document Setup. They are just guidelines after all. You can still have bleed when you save a PDF without the red guides.
    – Wolff
    Jun 17, 2022 at 15:29
  • But I never have this problem as I would always use InDesign to make book covers. Advantages (besides InDesign being much better suited for print design IMO): 1. Bleed guides are only shown on the outside and 2. You can export the cover as a spread and get crop marks that indicate the folds.
    – Wolff
    Jun 17, 2022 at 15:29
  • @pupeno you can toggle the red lines on and off via View > Guides > Hide/Show Guides - Using the shortcut for that menu items makes it faster.
    – Scott
    Jun 17, 2022 at 16:54

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