Exporting as PDF - huge size

Ask the community
1

I’ve created over 100 artboards in Figma and want to create a PDF from them. After exporting the file, I found that it’s quite large in size. How can I effectively reduce the file size? Compressing the PDF with online tool (ilovepdf) only seems to decrease the size by about a third, and it’s still around 10MB. I can’t export it as an image also.

Any help and explanation why it’s so heavy will be appreciate!

2

Hey @Anna_Dabek ! If you are having size issues, you might want to check if you have any big images that might be affecting the total size of the PDF. If this is the case, you might want to download the images on a smaller size (You can do this in Photoshop) or compress the images individually. You can compress images using a Figma plugin called “Downsize”. You can check it out here: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/869495400795251845/Downsize

If you don’t have any images affecting the file, you might want to try other online compression tools. I recommend using this one: Compress PDF - Reduce File Size Of PDF Online

" Online tools only do so much, key issues with the large file size are due to

  • text converted to vectors rather than simply embedding the font - online optimisation tools or plugins such as TinyImage won’t fix this
  • Images should be optimised to a required dpi level (ie. 225, 300 etc)"

You can get more ideas from this community post:

1 Like
3

Hi @MartinBajac Thank you for your response. It seems like I’ve tried everything you mentioned. I don’t have any images, just text, tables, and sometimes icons. I conducted an experiment just now, comparing two files. In the first one, I removed all text, and in the second one, I left it to compare. The first file was 1.7 MB, and the second one (with text) was 1.9 MB, so the difference is still negligible.

Could you please share any other advice to solve this? Like maybe saving this as without a text and add a text in another app like ilustrator or something like this?

4

@Anna_Dabek I’ve had the same problem with Figma and also found no solution. Without rhyme or reason, Figma just creates really big PDFs compared to other apps.

It’s actually quite a dealbreaker for me since there are many instances where I need PDFs to be small enough to email or meet uploading requirements. Oh well, hopefully it gets improved soon.

1 Like