Recently we had this large design project at Oblik Studio—we had to design an identity and branding as well as a website and a set of various digital materials. One of them was a pitch deck for the product, which we decided to design using Sketch, since our Design System was already set there.
We needed to export multiple artboards (each artboard as a slide from the presentation) to a PDF that is suitable for sharing on the web—we needed a reasonable file size.
The whole process of exporting, merging and optimizing the final PDF files was a real mess. 😰
Sketch has an option to export all pages to a single PDF, but what the hell, I needed to export just the artboards that are part of the presentation design.
So what we had to do on each export (100+ iterations for the project I mentioned above) was this:
1. Design each slide on a separate artboard in Sketch
2. Export all artboards as PDFs
3. Combine all PDFs in one using Acrobat Reader
4. Optimize the file size in Acrobat Reader
This is not only annoying but it is also very time-consuming.
Therefore, the whole process should be streamlined in a much simpler workflow.
So I found a way to run a Ghostscript command on the export action in Sketch. I am not a much of a developer (I am designer) but I was able to compile everything in a working Sketch plugin that we've been using for the last 6 months.
Recently Sketch released version 49, which comes with a new, improved JS API, which was a good reason to rewrite and bundle everything, and share it with you.
After a whole day of debugging I was able to make it compatible with OS X El Capitan, macOS Sierra and macOS High Sierra. Also, I've added the option to update the plugin from Sketch's "Manage Plugins" modal.
So here we go - my first Sketch plugin is now available.
Let me know if you have any feedback. 🙌
@yordanoff I know the struggle of a designer trying to code a Sketch plugin, it seems there are not enough tutorials around the web. 😊 Congratulations for pulling through. 👏
@mightyalex yes, exactly! Initially, I used the SVGO Example by Sketch and modified a few lines of code to run a Terminal command by trial and error (same way I started writing HTML/CSS 10+ years ago :D ). Eventually, I made it work for me and our team; and when I decided it's time to publish it turned out Sketch released a new API and documentation that are great (JS oriented) but are not quite finished yet. So I rewrote part of the code and published it. Turned out it doesn't work on macOS High Sierra (I was with Sierra only)... after one day of debugging the good guys at http://sketchplugins.com pointed out one of the functions is deprecated by Apple in High Sierra. So finally I fixed it and launched it for everyone. Anyway, thanks mate, appreciated! 🙏
@matthieudeluze thank you! It appears that if you have a problem, probably a couple of other people also have the same one. I am glad we published this for everyone. I really hope it will be helpful :)
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Well I think each and every tool should be done at least as simple as Sketch2PDF.
Pros:That's what I call a cool tool.
This is simply solving a common problem.
Cons:What are you talking about? No cons here 🤗