tip Tuesday :: pdf for Cricut update

As I gear up for the madness that is Advent, one of my jobs this week is to prep some printables for journaling. Quite often, they come as a pdf, which is indeed a great format for sharing digital art, but there’s one minor problem with that.

Your internet friend is lazy.

The idea of fussy cutting a whole sheet, let alone four sheets, of printable ephemera by hand makes me want to scratch my eyeballs out. Especially when I have a Cricut sitting RIGHT THERE that could handle all that tedious cutting for me, with far less complaining.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a direct method for uploading PDFs to Design Space. Three years ago, I shared my process for converting these handy dandy PDFs into PNGs suitable for uploading to cut on my Cricut. This process involves using Photoshop to remove backgrounds, then Procreate to outline the elements on my iPad**, and THEN I could pop them into Design Space.

In the intervening three years, Canva has added increasing functionality, and I can now do all the steps directly in Canva.

STEP ONE: Go to Canva’s free PDF Editor – you can go direct to the PNG option here

STEP TWO: Upload your PDF, and your document will automagically appear in Canva, in an editable format

STEP THREE: Select the first page to edit, and click “BG Remover” (unfortunately this is a premium feature, but Canva Pro is cheaper than Photoshop, so not a terrible investment). If you started with a white background, it can be hard to be sure it’s removed what you need, so let’s check that.

STEP FOUR: Click elements, search for a square, and pick any square that is coloured. It doesn’t matter what colour, as we will delete it later. Add it to your document, click “position” in the top menu, and then select the “Backwards” button – you will see the square behind your graphics.

Hooray! It worked! Except…if you have white in those elements, Canva might have removed the white from the elements too, like in these tags. If you don’t need to patch any holes, skip on down to step 6.

STEP FIVE (as needed): Select the “draw” tool from the left hand menu, pick the second texta from the top, and change the colour to white (or whatever colour you choose). Draw over the blank sections – it will go over the colours as well, don’t panic! You don’t need to be neat or colour in the lines, we will hide all that messiness in part two. If you are filling a regular shape, you might be able to use a circle or square to fill the space instead.

STEP FIVE PART TWO: Select “Position” from the top menu again, and click “backwards”. This will put your drawing layer behind your graphics, and voila, the blank space is no longer blank! Each time you start using the Texta again, it will create a new layer, so it may be faster, once the Position menu is open, to switch to the layers tab, and drag the graphics layer to the top.

STEP SIX: Often, printables will have branding, or crop marks, that we don’t want to appear on our final print. Extraneous details we don’t plan to cut are going to restrict the size we can go up to in Print & Cut, so let’s go ahead and get rid of those. In the top menu, click Edit, then Magic Eraser. Brush over the elements to delete, and click Erase. All gone!

STEP SIX PART TWO: While we are getting rid of extras, let’s get rid of that test square we added. Go to the position menu again, switch to Layers, and scroll to select the layer with the square. Then just hit delete on your keyboard (or use the little garbage bin icon) to remove it from your page.

STEP SEVEN: Nearly there! Select the page of your elements, click Edit, and then scroll down to Effects and choose Shadows. Select outline, and then scroll down to adjust the size of the outline, and change it to white. I tend to leave my outlines at the default 25px, but you can make it narrower or wider as you prefer. Be sure to keep an eye out for elements that are close together that may join up – or if dealing with words, make sure the outline is wide enough to keep the word together.

STEP EIGHT: It’s time to download! Click share, then download. Change the drop down menu to PNG, and make sure the “transparent background” is selected. Save it and you’re ready to upload and cut!

There is an outline option in Design Space, but I have found this method gives me smoother edges and a neater cut, for a similar amount of time and effort. There is also a background remover, which you could use after using Canva to convert to JPG/PNG, but I don’t have an Access subscription, and I do have a Canva Pro sub, so this method is the most cost efficient for me. Your subscriptions and time priorities might vary – there is a multitude of ways to get the same result, this is simply my preference!

It sounds like a lot, but when I’m not screenshotting every step, and writing it all down, it takes less than a minute to convert a multi page PDF to PNGs ready to throw on my Cricut** (printed using an Epson Ecotank printer**). I am not familiar with Silhouette Studio, but I would imagine it would accept PNGs as cut files, making this method suitable for Cameo machines, and most probably Scan’n’Cut as well.