Canva makes it easy to design presentations, social graphics, and documents — but getting a high-quality PDF out of Canva has some gotchas. Here is how to export your designs properly, including the difference between PDF Standard and PDF Print.
Free — 3 PDFs per month. No credit card required.
Canva's built-in export with the settings that matter.
Canva offers two PDF formats, and choosing the right one matters:
PDF Standard is optimized for screen viewing — smaller file size, 96 DPI, RGB color space. This is the right choice for documents you will share digitally, embed in emails, or view on screen. It is available on the free tier.
PDF Print is optimized for professional printing — 300 DPI, CMYK color space, with optional crop marks and bleed. This is the right choice for business cards, flyers, posters, and anything going to a commercial printer. PDF Print is a Canva Pro feature ($12.99/month).
For Canva presentations (slide decks), the same export flow applies. Each slide becomes a page in the PDF. If your presentation has animations or transitions, these are not captured in the PDF — only the final state of each slide is exported. For presentations with speaker notes, the notes are not included in the PDF export.
Canva's export is good for designs, but has gaps for web content.
High-resolution PDF export (300 DPI) with crop marks and bleed is locked behind Canva Pro at $12.99/month. Free users only get PDF Standard at 96 DPI, which is not suitable for professional printing.
If you use Canva Pro stock photos, illustrations, or premium elements on the free tier, the downloaded PDF includes watermarks on those elements. You need to either remove them or upgrade to Pro to get clean output.
The PDF export uses Canva's own rendering engine. You cannot change fonts, line spacing, or typography settings specifically for the PDF output — what you see in the editor is what you get in the download.
Multi-page designs with many high-resolution images and complex elements can take a long time to export. Very large documents occasionally time out or fail during the PDF generation process.
If you build a website using Canva's website feature, there is no way to export the published site as a PDF from within Canva. The website exists only as a live webpage — you would need an external tool to convert it.
For Canva-published websites and presentation views, Pretty PDF fills the gap.
Important note: For exporting Canva designs (flyers, social posts, print materials), Canva's built-in PDF export is the right tool. It renders the design exactly as you created it. Pretty PDF is not a replacement for Canva's design export.
Where Pretty PDF shines is converting Canva-published websites and presentation views to clean PDFs — something Canva does not offer natively.
Navigate to the Canva-published website, presentation view, or shared design link in Chrome.
The extension extracts the visible content and removes Canva's navigation, sharing controls, and interface elements.
Pick from five professional templates with embedded fonts and proper page breaks. Click Generate PDF for a clean document.
| Feature | Canva Export | Pretty PDF |
|---|---|---|
| Design PDF export | Native — excellent | Not designed for this |
| Webpage/site PDF | Not available | One-click with templates |
| Templates | Canva's own | 5 professional PDF templates |
| Content extraction | N/A — exports full design | Smart clutter removal |
| Price for PDF export | Free (basic) / $13/mo (Pro) | Free (3/mo) / $5/mo (Pro) |
Free — 3 PDFs per month. No credit card required.
Install Free Extension