Pricing

Figma to PRESENTA Getting Started

This document outlines the best-practices as well as the limitations you have to be aware when importing a Figma document into PRESENTA Template.

TL;DR

  • Only the FIRST Page of a Figma document can be imported. Further pages will be ignored.
  • Only elements within the Frame container are considered by the importer
  • By mention an element “in root level of the Frame” means that it can’t be in groups, components or nested frames
  • Text boxes have to be in the root level of the Frame in order to be dynamic
  • Text boxes requires an explicit fixed size of the textarea
  • Text in groups/components/nested-frames will be converted as static graphic elements
  • Parameters in text boxes need to be definet with the following syntax: {{name}}
  • Multiple text formatting in a single text box is supported
  • Image boxes have to be in the root level of the Frame in order to be dynamic
  • Medium/large images are better to be in the root level to avoid importer size limit
  • Image boxes can be masked by one single shape in order to keep its dynamic nature
  • QRCode, Charts and Data-Tables!

Figma vs PRESENTA

Figma is a powerful design editor with a lot of smart features meant to serve their rendering and prototyping engine.

PRESENTA is a document generation service for automation purposes. It has its own rendering engine.

Both engines are very different.

The Figma-2-PRESENTA converter is a PRESENTA platform feature that allows to transform a Figma Document to a PRESENTA Template. Its purpose is to give users the typical features of a modern design tool and at the same time providing automation capabilities from PRESENTA Platform.

Understanding the differences if key to get the most out of both tools.

Following the above TL;DR list is pretty much what you need in order to design your own PRESENTA Template.

Single Frame

Only a single Frame can be imported at a time. A Frame in Figma is a Project in PRESENTA. Also, only the first Page of the Figma document is imported:

You can grab the Frame URL using the contextual menu or by selecting the Frame and copy the URL from the browser address bar:

Elements within the Frame

Only elements within the Frame container are considered by the importer:

This can be exploited to keep additional elements, annotations or other element versions around the Frame without affecting the import process.

Dynamic Text vs Static Text

Text boxes have to be in the root level of the Frame in order to be dynamic.

By mention an element “in root level of the Frame” means that it can’t be in groups, components or nested frames

Text in groups/components/nested-frames will be converted as static graphic elements

Text box explicit size

Text boxes requires an explicit fixed size of the textarea. It’s not strictly a requirement but without an explicit size, the textarea size will be set according to the text that contains. This can be problematic in dynamic Text box where you’d like to put other text, possibly longer than the default value.

Parameters in Text

Parameters in text boxes need to be definet with the following syntax: {{name}}

Text formatting

Multiple text formatting in a single text box is supported

Dynamic Image vs Embedded Image

Image boxes have to be in the root level of the Frame in order to be dynamic

Medium/large images are better to be in the root level to avoid importer size limit

Mask an Image

Image boxes can be masked by one single shape in order to keep its dynamic nature

QRCode how to

Figma doesn’t know anything about QRCode. PRESENTA does.

The way to add a QRCode block is by using a simple Figma Rect to position and resize its bounding box, and put in the layer name the magic word $QRCODE:

PRESENTA importer will recognise and convert it in a proper QRCode block, preserving position and dimension within the Frame. It is possible to use more than one QRCode by giving a variation of the name, such as $QRCODE other.

TroubleShooting

Here a list of possible solutions for specific cases we’re aware of:

  • The Figma Frame container must have Rotation and Corner radius set to zero in order to be properly imported in PRESENTA.
  • The Figma Frame container must be without Effects in order to be properly imported in PRESENTA.
  • If there’s a bitmap cropped with the Figma Image Crop tool, the image needs to be flatten in order to be properly positioned and resized in PRESENTA.
  • In general, try to keep low the number of elements in Figma. A great room of optimization is by grouping static elements into a single group.