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Comment by upsuper | Hacker News Reader

Hello, I'm an engineer in Canva's editing team, which is also responsible for rendering of designs.

Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so.

I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer of transparent text on top.

If you know any design that produces PDF file where text becomes not selectable, that might be a bug, and it would be appreciated if you can provide more details so that we can investigate and possibly fix.

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I love HN.

"I wish the Xs at Y would make Y do Z"

> "Hi, I'm a X from Y. Y already does Z. I did that last Tuesday."

Always my favourite genre of interactions on this site.

There should be no need for HN to provide this kind of support channel. It exhibits how things don’t work.

You are assuming the parent poster actually attempted to go through support and work through the issue. I don't see indication of that. If anything, this thread indicates to me that many people form an opinion of a product and never seek support or never seek to revisit the issue and see if it has been fixed.

It's not support at all in this case, don't mix everything. Someone says something wrong about a product you're literally working on, there's nothing wrong in responding.

I confess I have never used Canva myself. However, every pdf that students send our way from Canva is basically just series of flattened images. This also applies to the many Canva derived pdfs which I see from job applicants. So... What is going wrong? I will look into it and message you if I find anything new.

Thanks greatly for making contact. Only on Hacker News.

To be fair to your product, it is the only viable means by which a set of slides can be worked on collaborativly and online. You saw that InDesigns collaboration tools suck and stepped in.

I realized that we provide an option called "Flatten PDF" [1] which does exactly what you described: flatten everything including text into a big image per page. It makes all text unselectable and also produces a very large file.

This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously tick it to make it happen.

But it seems that our support team sometimes presents this feature as a way to solve user issues, so maybe that's the reason.

[1] https://www.canva.com/help/download-flattened-pdf/

I had assumed 'Flatten PDF' was to make the PDF smaller so just used it without thinking or comparing!

I agree that the help page isn't very helpful. I had to reach out internally to understand what it is doing and why it is there.

Hey, I'm the SGEL for User Voice, ping me on slack and I'll be able to help.

"Flatten" comes from the world of desktop image editors. You "flatten" one layer down to the next to make one layer. Sometimes the people who work on these kinds of things forget their users might have never used software with metaphors like this.

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