Video transcript
9-minute video ·
Today I’m going to be showing you how to automatically import PDF files directly into Figma using the Convertify Figma plugin.
To get started, we just need to go to the “Resources” icon at the top of your Figma file, and if you click on that and search for “Convertify”, under the “Plugins” tab you’ll see Convertify pop-up. If you just go ahead and click on that, you can run the Figma plugin by either clicking on this “Run” button here or I would suggest clicking on this little “More options” icon and adding it to your Saved Plugins. I’ve already clicked on that; I’ve got it in my Saved Plugins, which I can access by right clicking anywhere going down to “Plugins”, going down to “Saved Plugins” and then clicking on the “Convertify” item, and that’s just going to run the Figma plugin we just set up a second ago.
When we open up the Figma plugin, by default it will be set to “Export Figma to Sketch” but you want to change this in this case to import PDF files, so you can just click on that drop down, go down to the “Import to Figma” section and then just click on the “Import PDF to Figma” item and that’ll just change the context of the Figma plugin to accept PDF files that you can drag and drop from your computer. By default, it’s going to import these as bitmaps or JPG images, we also have the option to import the pages as vector layers, but this feature is currently in BETA; I’ll show you what that looks like in a moment, and we can compare the two. I’ve just got a few different PDF files here, I’ve just got three that I’m going to try importing from PDF to Figma today. The first one I’m going to import is just this really simple portfolio PDF; I’m going to drag and drop that into the import PDF drop box in the Convertify Figma plugin, if I drag and drop that, that’s basically going to import the pages from our PDF directly into Figma as images. We can see here that if I zoom in, we’ve got some pixelation because they’re just normal images instead of vectors, but this is basically the most visually accurate way to import your PDF pages into Figma; they’ll just get imported as images rather than vectors or editable layers.
The other alternative, as I mentioned, is we can check this toggle here to import the pages as vector layers; if I re-import the same file, so I’m just going to drag and drop that PDF into Figma, let go, and that’s now going to import the PDF pages into Figma as vectors. When we zoom in this time we’ll be able to see that the vector shapes are obviously much sharper, we don’t have that same pixelation that we saw a second ago; we can basically zoom in and all this will be very sharp. The only downside to this is that the accuracy may not be as good, as I said, it’s still in BETA, but the other thing is if you’re using text layers in your design or in the PDF file these basically just get imported as vectors. As you can see here, this is a vector path of that text; unfortunately this isn’t actually editable text; in terms of if you’re in Figma and you create a text layer you can obviously edit this text in a text box but because we’re importing these PDFs as vectors basically the text layers get imported as paths. You can edit these, you can move them around, you can change the colors, all that sort of stuff, but you just can’t edit it. We can obviously layer in text layers into the design, so we could overlay text layers and remove text layers and things like that, but it’s just worth noting that this is not going to be native Figma text, so that’s just something to be mindful of.
The other thing we can do is we can import designs that maybe don’t have any text at all; for example, we’ve got some illustrations here that are in PDF, so we can go ahead and import those into Figma just by dragging and dropping that PDF file into Figma as well. Again, I’m going to do the JPG version first just to show you what that looks like, this option is always a bit quicker, and as I mentioned, always gets a bit more visual accuracy because we are just importing them as JPG rather than vectors, but once again we can import these with the vector layers turned on. I’ll re-import that file, drag and drop the PDF into Figma, and that will automatically import the PDF file as vector layers into your Figma canvas. As I mentioned, and as you can see here, it’s always going to be a bit slower to import the vector option rather than the JPG one, but once that finishes we should see these in our Figma file. As you can see, as I mentioned, there’s some cases where it’s going to be a bit buggy and you’re not going to be able to see some of the imported stuff, this might be just due to some clipping masks. We’ve got some clipping in here which is probably going to be hiding some of that content; you can probably edit this manually to get the actual content out; there’s going to be some content in there, as you can see in this case, it was just an image that was being masked. You can usually get the content out, but sometimes the clipping’s a bit off, but obviously this will be fixed up in future versions of Convertify as well. As I mentioned, it’s currently just in BETA, but you can see here that we’ve got vector layers; these are looking much sharper than the JPG one that we had before. That’s another option you can use if you wanted to import those PDFs into Figma.
The last file I’ll import is just a portfolio PDF; again, I’m going to do this as JPG first just to show you what that looks like, so I’m going to drop that PDF into Figma, this is going to be importing five pages. You can see here it’s imported those five pages from our PDF; we’ve got a few different portfolio pages, different lengths, and that just instantly imported them into Figma. These are again just images, so we can show and hide those, we can move them around as images, obviously. If we change the background, you can see where those are coming in, but as I mentioned these are just images; they’re not editable as far as any content goes. Once again, we’ll try it with the vector layers turned on, so I’m just going to drag and drop that PDF into Figma again, and this time it’s going to import it with all of that content as vector instead of just a flat image based import. That’s just inserting the PDF pages now, and we can see here again I’ll just change the background; we can see what’s actually being imported and if I zoom in we can see here that this is all vector based content. We’ve got our vector-based text layers here, so you can see here these are much sharper than before.
As I mentioned, the only downside is that you’ve basically got the text exported as paths. This is not editable text as far as text layers goes, these are just vector paths, so it’s going to be visually accurate. The reason why this usually happens in PDFs is the text basically gets outlined as vectors, and that’s to avoid any issues with fonts that may not be included on the computer of the user viewing the PDF, it’s trying to increase the visual accuracy of the document without relying on fonts. That’s usually why PDFs are more geared towards this kind of text content, but as I said, there’s going to be a couple of issues with things like clipping occasionally, so you may have to jump in there and extract some of those layers. You can see here that the rectangle is basically being hidden, so we can bring that out and you might have to sort of manually clip that as well, which you can do by changing this to fill and then you can do things like resize that to clip it again. As I said, there might be a little bit of manual updates that will be required for some of these layers in the meantime, but this is going to get you a pretty good import of PDFs in both either bitmap or vector based quality. As I mentioned, you’re probably not going to be wanting to use these if you need to edit the actual text, this is more so if you need to get some content from a PDF directly into Figma automatically, that you can then use for some purpose that may not require actually editing the text, but more so just getting a vector copy of the design from your PDFs into Figma, this is going to be a really quick way of going about it.
I’ll leave it there for today, I just wanted to show you a few examples of how you can import PDF files into Figma either as flat images or vector-based layers, as we just saw in this example. I hope that’s helpful if you’ve been wondering how to import content from PDF files into Figma without going through other kind of hacky workarounds like opening up in a different tool and copying pasting the layers out and things like that can only be a little bit tricky, but I hope this has been helpful if you’ve been wanting to automate this process, feel free to give Convertify a try and hopefully you can import your own PDFs into Figma in a way that’s going to be helpful. Thank you as always for watching, and we’ll be back soon with more Figma tutorials like this one very soon.
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