PDF's exported from figma don't open correctly in Adobe Illustrator

Hi,

I’ve exported a frame as a PDF and tried to open in illustrator. I wanted to avoid redesigning in illustrator as i need to set up for heavy animation in After Effects.

When i open the PDF in illustrator, all of the images and colours are missing. Everything is outlined and empty. Is this a bug?

Are there any workarounds to this? Why are the PDFs exporting in this way? PDF is a universal format so youd assume the images and colour info would be embedded in the PDF. I’ve tested it across several files and all have the same result. Screenshot attached.

Thanks!

Screen Shot 2021-03-09 at 10.20.48 am|348x500

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I don’t know what could be wrong with your PDFs, but I would suggest to use SVG, the quality of SVG export in Figma is higher than PDF.

For anyone encountering this, I found the ‘Clip content’ frame option messes up my pdf when I open it in AI. Maybe this helps someone…

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@Asgeir_Frimannsson How to rectify this issue?
I have contents clip masked in Figma, the clip masked contents gets lost while importing the files to ai

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Hey, I think using regular masks worked for me. Don’t fully remember tbh.
https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040450253-Masks.
Or you could open the file in AI and check the layers and remove the white overlay that’s covering the content.

lifesaver thanks

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Thanks this fixed it indeed!

I noticed that if the main artboard has Clip Content enabled and you export to PDF, the resulting PDF can be easily fixed in Illustrator:

In the layers panel, find the top most two groups and ungroup them.

I guess this also works for any frame deeper inside your main frame that has clip content enabled.

So the content inside the frame is not gone. It’s just improperly ‘clipped’ when opened in Illustrator and will become visible after ungrouping.

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thank you man. it does work. :blush:

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When I faced this problem, I started to remove parts of my document and export without each of them and then test whether the error went out.

I began by dividing the document into two halves, then split the “problematic half” into two, and so on, when it came to a group that was causing the error in Adobe Acrobat. Then, I simplified it maximally (combined all possible curves, reduced groups, etc.), and the problem disappeared.

Technically, I still don’t know what notably invoked a problem in exported PDF when opening via Adobe Acrobat :smiley: but it worked!