How to Save Files from Adobe for the PDF Editor

Save your designs as a PDF

When choosing to use design software to create your templates, you should follow the best practices listed below to ensure your designs convert correctly when you upload them into Desygner or Desygner’s design editor.

As a primary recommendation, SVG-based design software like Adobe Illustrator is more likely to produce better results.

Adobe Illustrator

Recommended settings

  • The Artboard settings should always match with a design format in Desygner’s design templates. It can be a default standard design format or a custom size format set by the company. For example: Facebook standard format is 1200 px x 628 px, RGB color mode, and 72ppi.
  • Every text element in the templates should always be in blocks. For example: “This is a sentence“, rather than “This“, “is“, “a”, “sentence” where all the words are in a separate text box.
  • You shouldn't convert text elements to outlines otherwise it will become a shape in the design template and will not be able to be edited.
  • Objects or shapes with appearance (e.g. fill, stroke, etc.) needs to be expanded into paths.
  • Gradients and masks should be rasterized.
  • Images larger than 10 MB should be optimized before being added to the design.
    Save your Illustrator file as Adobe PDF with Adobe PDF Preset set to PDF/X-1a:2001 or PDF/X-3:2002.

Additional tips for saving PDFs from Illustrator

  • OpenType ligatures are not supported. If you come across missing words (e.g. The word “office“ is converted to “o?ice“) you need to disable standard ligatures;
    To disable ligatures, open the OpenType panel, select all text objects and click on standard ligatures to disable.
  • Clipping masks shouldn't have internal groups or other masks in the same clipping group. If a clipping mask has additional internal groups or masks, they will automatically merge together and might break other objects within the template.
  • To avoid path objects from getting merged into other elements from the same template, you should add path objects into its own clipping mask. This process will ensure that path objects are enclosed into its own group.
  • Your PDFs shouldn't contain any hidden artboards (e.g. Having multiple artboards increases the complexity of the conversion). This means a single document should only carry the template and its pages, if applicable.

Adobe Photoshop

Recommended settings

  • The Artboard settings should always match with a design format in Desygner’s design templates. It can be a default standard design format or a custom size format set by the company. For example: Facebook standard format is 1200 px x 628 px, RGB color mode, and 72ppi.
  • Every text element in the templates should always be in blocks. For example: “This is a sentence“, rather than “This“, “is“, “a”, “sentence” where all the words are in a separate text box.
  • Merge background layers into one layer, and, if possible, flatten the background layer.
  • You shouldn't apply any blending options or effects to text layers.
  • Images larger than 10 MB should be optimized before being added to the design.
  • Images larger than the actual canvas size needs to be cropped to fit inside the canvas.
  • Save your file as a Photoshop PDF with Adobe PDF Preset set to PDF/X-1a:2001 or PDF/X-3:2002.

Before you upload your PDF into Desygner...

Make sure to match and upload your specific fonts into Desygner’s Brand Assets library correctly before importing your PDF files to ensure correct formatting in the final template.