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Product Polish: Compact PDF Download

Product2 mins
Updated Nov 17, 2020
compact pdf download animation

The PDF. It’s been around since the 1990s, and while business has changed a lot since then, PDFs haven’t. Qwilr Pages were made to be a better type of document — interactive, beautiful, responsive, and integrated with all your other tools.

But, we know there’s still a need for static documents for things like printing and passing out or sending to old-school clients who just really like their PDFs. That’s why we built a download functionality, so you’d always have the option when you need it.

We also know that our PDF download has, at times, left a lot to be desired. We’ve heard that downloaded documents often have too many pages, page breaks in strange places, or are just otherwise off in their layout.

So, we’ve spent the last few months speaking to even more users and going through a learning process to help us get even deeper insight on what we needed to improve. The results of that process is our latest release.

Drum roll, please...

We’re excited to announce our new compact PDF download!

Compact PDF download means shorter PDFs with less blank space, more intuitive page spacing and breaks, and an overall improved look. Now your downloads will have a cleaner format that better represents your content and business.

One of the biggest changes we made was to fit more blocks onto a page, instead of the previous default to one block per page. We built custom logic to assign blocks to pages, so we’re not just squishing as many blocks onto one page as possible. Instead, blocks are intelligently spaced in order to maintain a smooth flow throughout the document.

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Through our discovery process, we also identified a few other key problems, which have now been fixed:

  • Font scaling: Fonts that previously displayed as abnormally large in downloads have been downsized.
  • Quote Block overflow: Now, column headers follow Quote Block sections over multiple pages.

Plus, redesigned our download options panel so it’s easier to navigate and meets our updated accessibility standards. We simplified the option

PDF page option uploaded

In case you missed it

We also recently updated our saved block library to be accessible directly from the Dashboard. Check out the blog post to catch up on the latest updates and find out what they mean for you and your team.