The official free online compression tool from Adobe takes my document from 5 MB to 1.14MB, a factor of almost five.

The largest element in this document is a 240 KB JPEG image - the rest is just one page of text, set in basic Latin characters and very simple fonts like Roboto and Poppins.

So yeah, there’s no obvious reason why these documents should come out this large - my best guess is it’s embedding all the glyphs of all the fonts being used? I don’t know how else to account for one page with one 240 KB image coming out as a 5 MB PDF. Perhaps it’s not compressing the image?

Oh, and if I export a .fig file, this comes out at just 480 KB - that might tell you something about how much data is actually in there. (although I don’t know if it’s embedding the fonts or just referencing the standard fonts in Figma…)

This issue drove me to make a plugin:

Compressed PDF Exporter

Clients and stake holders all want to review designs but they don’t want to learn a new tool to do so. Too much of the time, they just want a PDF.

If I export one from figma, all of my source images will be embedded as lossless PNGs at their source resolution, not at their implementation size. To make matters worse, this over-sized raster content will be not compressed… The PDF will be enormous. A landing page with a few images can easily be over 100MB with the native export!

Compressed PDF Exporter lets you compress the raster content in the pdf, and create efficient, PDFs with a deliberate balance of quality and file size.

Try it out!

https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1217632496996584187/Compressed-PDF-Exporter

I’ll definitely check it out. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for this, appreciate it

I tried this one and so far works like a charm

https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1233404694629290096

None of these plugins are helping. I have a 4-page CV document; text only with 1 tiny image and I can’t get it under 4MB even with plugins and additional rounds of compressions. I need to upload it to a website that only allows files up to 2MB! No idea what to do. Tried all plugins and online tools and spent hours trying to find a solution…

Praying for this without having to use a plugin or separate site/program. And also editable text so simple PDF edits can be done in Adobe Acrobat.

Hey y’all, engineer here at Figma: we just shipped an update to utilize more compression for PDF files. We now compress images using JPEG at 75% quality and compress long text streams using zlib.

Example: we had an ~89 Mb file that now exports at ~4 Mb.

Different files will have different compression results depending on their contents. Please let us know if you have any questions about this update or other PDF sizing questions.

Thank you.

Hi, the new PDF compression settings do not allow me to export a high quality file, is there any way I can revert back to the previous export version?

Hey @Aleksey.Kravchenko will discuss this with the team and get back to you.

It would be great to make compression settings for exporting files where relevant - jpg and pdf

We have an open task for exposing JPEG quality settings when Export.

In regards to PDF Export, I’m curious if you can share the file where you’re noticing low quality? Also, what’s your use case: are you sending things to a printer? Or something else.

Another question for my own curiosity, what motivates you exporting in JPEG vs PNG?

Export settings for jpg is great news )

Like any geek, I love the customization feature itself, even if I will use it rarely…

Figma has become my primary tool for creating most digital products over the past few years, but occasionally print orders come up.

I have an algorithm to do these orders the same way in Figma with minimal prepress.

After the last update, I noticed that the quality of raster images when exporting to PDF was severely degraded, especially noticeable on small but detailed objects.

I realize that the selected PDF export settings will work for most users, and they reduce the weight of the file considerably. But I also think that cases like mine are also not rare and occur in designers’ work, so the ability to customize compression for exporting to PDF would be very useful and make Figma an even more versatile product.

Hi @Ahmed_Abdalla , for me at least, I’ve been using FIGMA to build showcases of Game Art for clients. A PDF with different sprites and text descriptions was the ideal output, I would get the crisp raster graphics and the text that could be easily scaled up or down.

I can’t really share any personal work, but here is a sample of how raster images exports look now:

Unfortunately the forum doesn’t allow for pdf upload.

But as you can see, since pixel art is by it’s very nature very small and uncompressed, the JPG compressor destroys it.

Exporting as SVG is not possible because it applies filtering, unfortunately. The JPG Compressor also makes these pdfs bigger than the original exports, because since the PNG were in such low resolution with a small color count, they are actually smaller than the PDF export.

Is there any way to turn off this jpeg compression, and select back to as it was before?

Thank you!

Yes, for me that works with low resolution game art/pixel art, the JPG compression makes Figma impossible to use for what I used to (building samples/pitch decks/art for review and exporting those as PNG)

Hi Ahmed, does this new compression keep text as text in the pdf? I’ve been making my resume in Figma and when I export the pdf seems to write the text as a vector image and makes the files size around 2mb. It’s just text on a page so thinking the file size should be well under a mb if Figma exported the pdf with embedded text.

@Keith_Kerr by default, Figma’s PDF exporter will try to export text as text but if it can’t use PDF primitives for writing text it’ll convert things to an image and export that. But we didn’t change this decision making. We just made to sure to compress existing text streams and image streams. It may be that your resume was being exported as an image all along (even if it’s selectable).

Hi y’all! Another engineer at Figma here: we just shipped another update that allows you to choose between High, Medium, and Low quality when exporting to JPEG and PDF. If you select High quality, your PDFs will be exported with no image compression. The default setting for PDFs is still Medium quality, which maintains the compression we previously added to reduce file size. Let us know if you have any questions – thank you!

Great news! Thanks for keeping this issue on mind! 🦄🫶🏻

Amazing! Thank you for your work. I will have to try it out later.