- Setup Figma Frames
- Layout Presets
- Add Clickable Links
- Embed GIFs & Videos
Supported Media Embeds
- Apply Layer Animations
- Add Custom Keyframes
- Speaker Notes
- Import Charts from CSV
- Upload Presentation
- Presenting in the Browser
- Speaker Mode Controls
- Observer Mode Links
- Presentation Analytics
- Custom Share Links
- Create New Presentation URL
- Pitchdeck Video Tutorials
Designing Presentations
Web Presentations
Video Tutorials
Troubleshooting Pitchdeck
This is a known, long-standing Figma bug where purple boxes are shown instead of the image, and becuase Pitchdeck is using the native PDF export function from Figma behind the scenes, the plugin will inherit these bugs when exporting PDFs if they occur in Figma as well.
One suggestion that can help is to ensure the problematic layer is actually nested inside of the main Figma frame, as sometimes a Figma layer is “visually” positioned on top of your frame on the canvas, but the layer itself is still sitting outside of the frame; this seems to be related to why the problem occurs sometimes.
Please ensure all your frames are the same size; 16:9 ratio frames are recommended (eg. 1280x720 or 1920x1080) for the best presentation results across most monitors and TV screens.
Please note that “duplicating” a Figma file (or “page” inside a Figma file) will also carry over its URL/password from the original once, so it’s always best to create a blank one if you need a new URL.
This allows you to maintain a separate presentation deck per page within a Figma file (or just use entirely separate Figma files to do this). You can have an unlimited amount of presentation URLs this way.
If you’re using third party fonts to design your slides in Figma, and exporting your presentation for Google Slides, please note that Google Slides won’t be able to render the font (even if it’s installed on your computer), as it only supports any font that is available via Google Fonts.
If you’re clicking on the Download button in the plugin confirmation export screen, but the file isn’t downloading; restarting the Figma app (or closing/re-opening your Figma tab if you’re using the browser version) should resolve the issue when you re-run the plugin and export your file again.
This is often caused by text layers having a fixed width/height in Figma on the text layer’s bounding box which is smaller than the size of the text content itself, which causes an incorrect position offset. Setting the text layer resize option in Figma to “Auto Height” should resolve this.
The other cause of this is usually a text layer in Figma that contains multiple line-height or font size values in the same block of text. Unlike Figma, unfortunately PPTX files only support a single/overriding line-height value per text layer, and having multiple font sizes per text block will also throw out the vertical flow in your PPTX file.
To resolve this issue, you can split out the text content inside of your Figma text layer with a different line-height or font size into its own layer, and position that where you need it to be in relation to the other text layer(s); this way each text block will have its own single line-height and font size value.
If you’re exporting a presentation while the image assets in Figma are still progressively loading, they may be exported looking pixelated, as the image wasn’t fully loaded in the Figma file before it was exported. To resolve this, please ensure that all of the images have loaded 100% and are looking sharp inside the Figma file before exporting your presentation with the Pitchdeck plugin.
To help further with solving this issue, you can use the “Downsizer” feature in our TinyImage Figma plugin to shrink down your image fills to match their layer size, which will shrink their file size and ensure they load much faster in your Figma file.
If you’re exporting your designs to use in Google Slides, please note that Google Slides will automatically “downscale” any images in your deck that are bigger than 1600 pixels; this can cause them to lose some visual quality if you’re exporting them to a .pptx file with larger images than the upper limit.
To help avoid this, if you select the Google Slides option in the export settings, Pitchdeck will automatically ensure your images sizes are capped at 1600px to avoid them getting compressed when imported into Google Slides.
Depending on the aspect ratio of your Figma layer/embed in Pitchdeck, you may need to change the Figma Prototype scaling option before copying the Prototype URL to paste into the Pitchdeck plugin to embed it into your layer.
When you open your Figma Prototype, if you click on the Options dropdown (in the top right of the header), then select the Fit Width scaling option before copying your Prototype URL to use in Pitchdeck as a layer embed, that should ensure the Figma Prototype embed scales up/down to the size of your Figma layer (as long as the aspect ratio of the Figma layer matches the aspect ratio of your Figma Prototype).
If you can’t see the Fit Width option, you can also try manually updating your Figma Prototype embed’s scaling=
parameter in the URL to be scaling=scale-down-width
, and this should ensure the Fit Width scale option is used to display your Figma Prototype.
One reason this might be happening is if your ISP (internet service provider) is blocking the QUIC protocol. You can confirm this by opening up your developer console in the browser or in Figma and see the error message ERR_QUIC_PROTOCOL_ERROR
.
There are a couple of workarounds for this issue:
- Switching to your mobile phone’s Wi-Fi hotspot/tether for your computer’s internet connection
- Disabling QUIC in your browser
There’s a rare/known bug where Figma will run out of memory while trying to extract SVG image data from certain complex layers; these usually include groups that contain multiple text layers or single complex text layers (often using a custom font, which requires more memory in Figma).
If you run into this error, the Pitchdeck plugin will display a notification at the bottom of the screen telling you which frame, and which layer specifically is causing the memory issue.
It will also tell you to click the “reload page” in the Figma warning dialog, and then once the page reloads, to add [PNG]
to the start of the problematic layer name (eg. “[PNG] My original layer name”). This will let the Pitchdeck plugin know to fetch PNG image data for that specific layer instead of SVG image data, which resolves the memory issue.
Occasionally some images will contain a faint, thin white line around the edges. Figma does this if a layer isn’t positioned on a rounded pixel value (eg. Y: 156.76 or X: 56.3) will automatically result in this sub-pixel line getting included in the export. To resolve the issue, please ensure that your layer positions are all rounded pixel values.
If you’re using a gradient fill(s) for a text layer in your Figma design, Pitchdeck will automatically take the first gradient fill and use the first color of that gradient as the “solid” color in your .pttx
export.
One good option for hosting videos is Backblaze B2; you can sign up for a free account that gives you 10gb of free storage, and if you create a public storage bucket, you should be able to copy/paste the links for any video files you upload to it and drop that link to the .mp4
into Pitchdeck.
Another popular file hosting option is Dropbox, which will let you upload your .mp4
file, and use that link in the Pitchdeck plugin; Pitchdeck will automatically handle changing the ?dl=0
to ?raw=1
to ensure the link points directly to the video file (rather than the Dropbox website player).
Due to GIF export not being natively supported in Figma, any GIFs added “directly” inside your Figma designs won’t be animated; to use animated GIFs, please add them as URLs inside the Pitchdeck plugin.
There’s a known issue with the Figma desktop app (only on Windows), which also happens for normal file exports from Figma. When you go to save your file, you may see an “all files” label. If you ignore this and continue by clicking “Save”, it should still save the file with the correct extension and allow you to open it as expected after it has downloaded to your computer. If it still saves the file with a blank extension, you should be able to rename the file to manually append the correct extension to the file name.
Google Slides has a 100mb limit per PPTX file getting imported; one workaround for this is to split up the PPTX file you’d like to import into smaller files (using a tool like this) and then upload them into your Google Slides file one at a time (which gets around the upload size limit issue, and still lets you have all the slides in one file).
If your PDF exports are going really slow, it’s likely due to having high-res/large image fills in some of the content and/or it can be related to having lots of large “Layer Blur” effects on your layers, which can both cause Figma to take a much longer time generating PDFs.
To help with the image fills issue, you can use the “Downsizer” feature in TinyImage to shrink down your image fills to match their layer size, which will shrink their file size and ensure they load much faster in your Figma file.
To help with the “Layer Blur” issue, you can convert these into flat image layers instead by right-clicking your layer in Figma -> Copy/Paste As -> Copy as PNG -> paste the layer onto the Figma canvas (CTRL + V on Mac, or CMD + V on Windows); then you can position the layer inside of your Figma frame/slide in the same spot, before hiding or deleting the original layer that you copied/pasted as a flat PNG.
Once you’ve finished downsizing the image fills in your Figma page and/or swapping out your Figma layers with “Blur” effects for flat images instead, re-running Pitchdeck and exporting your PDF again via the plugin should be much faster.
Pitchdeck will try to automatically detect if a layer contains areas of full transparency and set PNG as the default export format, otherwise it will be set to JPG. You can override this by adding [PNG] to the Figma layer name, or by setting the export setting format of any layer to JPG or PNG in Figma’s right-hand column.
Please note that opening the exported .pptx
file on a computer which doesn’t have the fonts used in Figma installed will cause the text to look different than it does in the Figma design. Please ensure you install any required fonts or replace/substitute any missing fonts where needed.
Presentation URLs will automatically expire after a 180 day period of inactivity (180 days after the link was last accessed and viewed); if you would like to re-activate the URL after it has expired, simply run Pitchdeck in the Figma file and click Upload Web Presentation.
There is a known issue with Netskope blocking access to Firebase databases; to resolve this, please ensure you allow firestore.googleapis.com:443
(as per this thread).
Please note, if you’re in China, the accounts server may be blocked by “The Great Firewall of China”. If you’re seeing an activation error, despite using a valid key, you will likely need to use a VPN to resolve the issue.
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