With the foundational library in place, we met the challenge of representing complex design elements like shadows, blurs and gradients head on. If we let some big, unsightly pixels show on your perfectly tuned work, we’d be letting you down, and we love you too much to do that! Feature highlights This is especially critical for print applications when the output medium is large, or for digital applications where a variety of sizes of the same asset need to be generated. It’s exactly this compromise, to rasterize or to fight on, that we needed total control over in order to make our exporter really shine. It’s always possible to give up and rasterize on a complex effect or gradient and put in a picture of it rather than describing it precisely. Since PDF can contain embedded images alongside vector representations, this gives engineers an easy way out when things get difficult. However, PDF descriptions can be hard to wrangle and optimize. This is how PDF text and drawings can look crisp at any zoom level - it’s fundamentally a vector format, like SVG, but much more complex. This gave us the control and precision necessary to meet the standards we strive to maintain for our users.Īs a format, PDF is different from PNG because it contains a detailed description of your designs, not merely an image of them. So we decided to build our own PDF library from scratch. After poring over 1300 pages of documentation and scrutinizing existing libraries, we discovered existing tools forced us to make unacceptable compromises. For the story of its creation and some highlights showing how we honed particular elements of the exporter, read on! Building the foundation To see more details, check our our documentation.

How to save individual pages of a pdf