There are a couple of considerations to be made here:

1. When you save/close a PDF (with Ai editing capabilities), open it back, make some edits and press Cmd+S (Save), original PDF settings are preserved. I am assuming there are no expectations of changing this behavior.

2. Same document, when Saved As (copy), the PDF options dialog picks up the settings embedded in the PDF as the starting point. Users can then change it. By showing user's last used setting (as requested in this report), it would not be possible to populate PDF's embedded setting in the dialog.

Please share if this is an acceptable change.

I want to add my voice to this as well. Definitely agree! It's amazing that this doesn't exist yet. It would save designers a ton of time. Every little adds up.

It appears there isn't any answer from Adobe itself, yet. Until it comes, below method might work for some of you.

You may create an action and assign a shortcut to it. The action may simply be a save as action, which will save the document to a specific folder with the name of the original document (assuming your work would already be saved as .ai copy). Trick here is, you won't interrupt the action to name the document. Therefore the action will go ahead and create a pdf copy of your file, with the same name of .ai copy of it, with the pdf presetting that you save the action with, to the specified folder (this folder will always be the same). You later go to the folder and pick up your files and move it to the necessary folder. I do this when converting multiple files to pdf with the same presetting. With one shortcut, the pdf is done! It's just not in the folder I want it to be, but it's easier to move them later than saving them manually.
There is a glitch with this method, though. For some big and complicated artworks, i have experienced some file corruptions which had been fixed after i manually pdf saved them.
Hope this helps to some of you. Cheers!

we have 6 designers in the company who do exactly that same thing multiple times EVERY SINGLE DAY. Please adobe. :D

I haven't seen any updates on this. I haven't seen any way to create an action for this. It should be simple to do (InDesign incorporated it long ago); I'm not sure why it wasn't done long ago.

Any updates on this?

I think you can make an action for it.

Yup. That should have been there a long time ago…

Agree. It would be great to be able to change the default option at the very least--or have a key-command "Export" option with ONE interface to verify setting, filename and location. We are constantly generating lo-res PDFs to email for review and approvals. Currently we: 1. "Save a Copy" (command-option-S) 2. Edit the filename to remove the word "copy" 3. Choose "PDF" from drop-down menu 4. Click "Save" 5. Choose "Smallest File Size" from the drop-down menu. That's a lot of steps, and a bummer of a productivity suck. :( Wish it could be like Print Presets: command-P, choose your preset, done! Boom.

I always use the same settings but it's not the Illustrator default. It would be really great to be able to set the default to whatever I wanted. I use a custom PDF settings profile.

Still waiting to see if this happens, would make my day a lot smoother :)

Does anyone know if they have changed this yet???? You're all right — it's infuriating how many useless bells and whistles they have thrown into Illustrator and they can't give us this very important work flow reduction feature. So frustrating to have to constantly change from the ridiculous "Illustrator Default" PDF preset. Illustrator has gotten so bad that I use InDesign to do many things I used to do in Illustrator. And I go back to the very first version of Illustrator!

This is a feature or setting well over due.

Yes. I primarily use one custom setting. Def need this! This should have been a no-brainer long time ago.

I work with many files, shared by multiple designers, created and worked in many computers with different versions of Illustrator. I am constantly running into the issue of not being able to open a file because it was not down-saved to an older version. It is such a pain to have manually change the settings each time. Today, I have to re-save over 100 files costing me about 1.5 of work.

I hope that adobe improves on this,

I totally agree. Why wasn't this done years ago instead of adding the other dumb features we never use?

I 100% agree.

In the past it seems recording an action to save to your desktop remembered the last preset used, but this often got corrupted, so cannot gaurantee this will work on all .ai verions. Our need is to make sure there is no color conversion, so the printer can review spot plates correctly.

I second this!!

I save PDF versions of my Illustrator files dozens of times daily, and every...single...time...I have to manually go find and select the correct option in the PDF dropdown menu. Illustrator has never had a way to change the default PDF setting the way InDesign has, and it needs it!

This is not a big feature request, but for me it’s probably the biggest pain point Illustrator has. Please fix.

Please make it happen!