PDF

PDF export

Watch this tutorial to learn how to export your components to PDF so you can print and prototype your designs.

New PDF export

Earlier this year we starting building a new pdf export mode which is ready to test! To test it out you can follow these steps:
    Go to your account
    Enable 'tinker mode' Test Tube
    In the component editor, click the 'New pdf export' button which magically appears
From there you'll be able to select a component and then set it up to export as you like. On the new pdf export page you'll be able to do cool new things like:
  • Export in CMYK
  • Set any page size, or choose to have the page size match the card size (this is a big deal for some printers who need exactly 1 card per page).
  • Embeds fonts
  • Have an automatically generated spot color dieline (for launch tabletop)
  • Embed a color profile
  • Convert to a PDFX standard
  • Get smaller pdfs does to more intelligent use of repeated images


Limitations of the new pdf export:

The new pdf exporter is pretty amazing and can do very cool things like embed fonts, convert to CMYK, store images efficiently and much more. However, here are some current limitations:
  • No text-wrap: balance or pretty - We've logged a request with our provider and they said they'll eventually add support for these, but they're out for now.
  • No text-stroke - we've upgraded textshadow all-directions now so it's a great replacement.
  • No Woff2 format - fonts using a Woff2 format simply won't be embedded. Replace with Woff or Truetype etc.
  • No conic gradients
  • The blur filter effect is not compatible with changing the opacity.
  • PDF format can't actually support shadows, so what the exporter does is rasterise any effects (like text-shadow or box-shadow) into an actual image, so that the pdf can render it. This is industry standard behaviour but there are some quirks:
    If you have text shadow on some text AND that text is bold AND you have no bold font glyph - pdf exporter will actually make it's own synthetic bold which doesn't match Chrome's and is a bit wider. So bottom line is you can't have exactly matching text if you use bold + textshadow + your font has no actual bold font glyphs. Use a font with bold glyphs instead.
Let us know what you think in the #new-pdf-exporter channel on our Discord!