Launched: Export Compressed PDFs

Leon · 2021-05-13T15:51:28+00:00

Describe the problem your experiencing and how your idea helps solve this When I export out PDFs and attach them to emails for review for stakeholders who either are not in Figma or just prefer to review and leave notes via PDF mockups, I always have to find a PDF compression solution that can shrink down the sizes. In addition to PDF compression, sometimes merging multiple files into a single document is something that I wish Figma gave some options for when exporting. Add as much context as possible (screenshots, Figma files, mockups, etc.) PDFs exported when they contain some kind of image seem to be quite large, maybe because the whole image is intact and it isn’t cropped down. Or just the quality is retained as close as possible to the Figma quality. Ask questions to bring the community into the conversation (e.g. Does anyone else experience this? Is anyone using a plugin or workaround to help solve this?, etc. I’m not aware of any community plugin that solves this. Are there any out there?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
May 13, 2021
47 replies
24194 views

Describe the problem your experiencing and how your idea helps solve this
When I export out PDFs and attach them to emails for review for stakeholders who either are not in Figma or just prefer to review and leave notes via PDF mockups, I always have to find a PDF compression solution that can shrink down the sizes. In addition to PDF compression, sometimes merging multiple files into a single document is something that I wish Figma gave some options for when exporting.
Add as much context as possible (screenshots, Figma files, mockups, etc.)
PDFs exported when they contain some kind of image seem to be quite large, maybe because the whole image is intact and it isn’t cropped down. Or just the quality is retained as close as possible to the Figma quality.
Ask questions to bring the community into the conversation
(e.g. Does anyone else experience this? Is anyone using a plugin or workaround to help solve this?, etc.
I’m not aware of any community plugin that solves this. Are there any out there?

Share an idea

Show previous replies

LazyDeveloper

You can try PowerPoint, just go to design and customize the page, then arrange the exported picture accordingly just tried it.
Hope it works for you

Weronika_S

I downloaded “TinyImage Compressor” plugin on Figma and it works!!! finally… 😫 🙌

Dennis_N

Power Member

Figma pdf export = 200mb
3rd party tool = 2mb
Yikes.

I don’t want to be depended on 3rd party apps.

Norah_Medlin

The Adobe online Compress tool worked great!

Hanefi

Since Adobe has Figma, maybe now is a good time to work on a better implementation of PDF export feature? Illustrator’s “smallest file size” option is a gem.

Rasmus_Schultz

New Participant

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?

Rasmus_Schultz

New Participant

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…)

Taylor_Osborn

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