I have found my self wishing before a way to do this. The thumbnails from Indesign as a PDF would be very nice to send as an additional comp item to clients sometimes. Haven't messed with it since CS4, but then my attempts to make a PDF of what I could clearly print to my inkjet would not work.

Tom

I was going to say the same thing that sagar-khanna said, but I would add that you may need to split the PDF into separate pages first. You can do that with Acrobat using Document>Extract Pages, and tick the box for pages as separate files. I'm not sure if you can do this with a multi-page PDF, but I'd be interested to hear what you need to do to make that happen. When I tried it (setting the import options to place all pages), it didn't allow me to use the gridify feature (I'm using CS5).

One problem with using gridify when placing extracted pages is the page sequence is wrong. For instance, a 20 page document is placed in the sequence 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 2, 20, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

The problem seems to be that Acrobat exports the pages as 1-20 when it needs to be 01-20, in other words there needs to be the same number of digits for each number in the sequence.  I tried experimenting with the prefix options when exporting from Acrobat (Document > Split Document) but couldn't find anything that worked.

As a workaround you could use a utility to rename the extracted pages sequentially before placing. (I made a workflow in Automator, which comes with Mac OS X).

ja3754 wrote:

As a workaround you could use a utility to rename the extracted pages sequentially…

Bridge can do that. Go to Tools>Batch Rename. There is also a freeware program called R-Name, but I think it's Mac only.

In the past, one could set a thumbnail to PRINT, choosing PDF as the Printer, then using the Printer button at the bottom, SAVE AS PDF. et voila!

an emailable downsized layout.

NOW, since CS4 (or5?),  SAVE AS PDF IS NOT SUPPORTED in that dialog box.

PLEASE FIX THAT, and all will all be happy.

until the latest update, one workaround was to PRINT to pdf: it would save to the printer dialog box, but not print. From there, douuble click on it,  to open as a pdf, it will be HUGE. Way too large to send. THEN, take a screen capture of each pdf page of the Downsized layout pdf, and place those into an indesign document. lots easier than pasting individual pages into a thumbnail layout.

which, since the latest update is where things stand again. the Print as PDF no longer appears in the  print dialog box. sigh.

PLEASE... we need to be able to save Downsized layouts as sendable-sized pdfs!

Thanks for your input, printed  thumbnails are a wonderful feature, but what i need is a Thumbnail version as a PDF ~ something of modest size than can be sent be sent via email.

and as of the latest update i am back to exporting pages (or spreads) as JPGs, and flowing them via 'update links' into a premade, mock-thumbnail INDD template.  (This is a monthly publication, so i am lucky to have the same set up every time.) The jpgs will selfnumber, and if prefaced the same way each version, update nicely  ~ this is convoluted, but works.

Definitely not as painless as being able to Print Thumbnails as a PDF, though.

Another option for doing thumbnails is to use the "N Up Consecutive" setting of IDImposer.  You can have whatever number of rows and columns per output page that you want. It creates a new InDesign document, which you can then write out to a small-ish PDF file using the "Smallest File Size" preset of Export to PDF. Elapsed time: likely less than a minute.

Restriction:

There is no option to create a thumbnails doc consisting of Reader Spreads. Output is page-by-page.

(You can, however, do a Printer Spreads thumbnails doc, by running IDImposer twice -- first, to do the Saddle Stitch order layout, then use N Up Consecutive to produce the thumbnails.)

Cheers,

Stephen, author of IDImposer

http://idimposer.com