Decks can now export exactly as they look
Exporting a deck to PDF has always been content-faithful: every slide's words, lists and tables reach the file, one page per slide. For most decks that is the better artifact — it is small, it is quick, and you can select and search the text.
But a deck whose point is how it looks came out flattened. A slide with a gradient background printed on white. A slide written as raw HTML — the way design-led slides usually are — lost its layout. Anything carried by CSS (background images, custom positioning, rotations) simply had nowhere to go, because the PDF was being rebuilt from the slide's text rather than from the slide as drawn.
Export to PDF on a deck now offers a choice:
- Content-faithful — unchanged, and still the default. Fast, small, selectable text, and it needs nothing installed.
- Pixel-faithful — the deck is laid out in a real browser, on the same 16:9 stage and with the same styling the Present view uses, and printed from there. Gradients, background images, raw HTML, CSS layout and transforms all arrive exactly as they look on screen. Images stored alongside your slides are embedded in the file, so the PDF stands on its own.
The trade is worth stating plainly: a pixel-faithful export takes longer, the file is larger, and the text in it is a picture of text rather than text — so it cannot be selected or searched. Reach for it when the deck is going to a client or a stage; keep the default when the deck is going to a reader.
When you will see the option
The choice appears only on decks, and only where the platform can render one — it needs a headless browser available to the server. Portals that have one show both options; portals that do not simply show no choice and continue to export content-faithfully, exactly as before. Nothing about the existing export changed, and no export you run today behaves differently unless you pick the new option.
If you administer a portal and want to offer this, see Pixel-Faithful Export for how to point the platform at a browser.