PDF Export - Add option to not outline text

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
May 5, 2021
11 replies
5078 views

We use Figma to create one-pagers and guides. The issue is that when exporting to PDF Figma automatically outlines all of the text. You lose the ability to make an editable PDF with acrobat because all of the type is a shape. It would be great to have the option to retain the type when it’s exported. If there’s an option to fix this lmk.

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Vasilis_Konstantoudakis

Any news on this update?
It would be super helpful. 😬

tank666

UX/UI designer. Figma expert. Creator and developer of plugins and widgets for Figma and FigJam. Check out my resources in Figma Community: figma.com/@tank

Daniel_Gallegos

@tank666 Has Figma team addressed this issue? I’m trying to find alternative solutions but no dice.

tank666

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any news from Figma about this. When exporting PDF, text is still converted to vector.

When the Figma team adds this feature, you will find out about it here or on the releases page.

UX/UI designer. Figma expert. Creator and developer of plugins and widgets for Figma and FigJam. Check out my resources in Figma Community: figma.com/@tank

Bill_Bright

I know that Figma probably envisions their platform being mostly a web collaborative tool where people share, review, comment and deploy on the web, but there are times (especially in the agency world) where sharing and reviewing PDFs is going to be the norm for years to come. And having PDFs with selectable text (vs. outlined text) makes for DRASTICALLY smaller file sizes and better rending in non-Adobe PDF viewers (in addition to Adobe Acrobat itself) –

The ability to not outline text and embed fonts is crucial to so many workflows.

Rebecca_Cardinale

Is there any update to this potential feature? I just went through over an hour with my IT department thinking my PDF editor was broken only to discover this was the issue.

Elza_Karklina

Just ran into this same issue. The quickest workaround was to export the frame as a .svg file (uncheck “Outline text” under export options to keep the text editable). Then open it in Adobe Illustrator, and save the file as a PDF (make sure that additional color profiles are not included).

But this isn’t a foolproof method - any raster images used will disappear (and you also need an additional app for this). It’s apparent, that the functionality is there, so I don’t understand why the same thing can’t be done for PDFs.

The pdf export functionality is one of the reasons why I and my team have managed to convince so many of our clients to make the switch to Figma. So it feels disingenuous to find out that PDF export is so limited.

Sasha_Kos

I have designed a beautiful CV in Figma but the PDF export is not useful due to the file size (despite compression plugins) and outlined text. This has set me back considerably and I’m now forced to go back to InDesign for this simple document. Please fix these PDF export issues 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏