Hi ​@costa, thank you for posting in the community! Would you mind sharing more information about the ‘ghost shapes’ you see in the PDF export? is this appearing in one of the pages of your exported file?

If the issue persists, could you please share the following to help us take a closer look?

• A description of the download settings (file type, document pages, cropping, quality, etc.) that you selected for the download. 

• The temporary Support PIN for this document? This will allow me to take a closer look at the issue you’re experiencing.

For more information on generating a Support PIN, check out this Help Center article. This Support PIN doesn’t allow anyone but Lucid Support to take a look at your document, so you are safe to post it here.

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions. 

​@Leianne C 

Re: the ghost shape in the exported PDF: can you see the dark rectangle? It’s visible only in that export and doesn’t correspond to any content of the document.

Re: “if the issue persists” -- well yes, I tried several times and got the same results.

Now, by “download” you probably mean “export” -- there’s no actual downloading of the document’s source contents that you would support, now would you?

“file type” has been described, even two of them, see above.

The pages in the document which were selected for export are sl01-sl21

The rest of the settings are defaults.

Here’s the support PIN: dukked5N2weTmH138991933

If your (many, many) engineers could just include layer selection in the presentation setup, this would make it so much easier -- after all, it’s your interest a user stays within the app.

Hi Costa, thank you for sharing the support PIN. It looks like you have identified a bug with objects with the drop shadow enabled which is why you are seeing the ‘ghost’ shape. I have reported this to our development team. 

In the meantime, disabling the shadow should prevent the extra rectangle from appearing in the PDF export. 

I sincerely apologize for any disruption this may cause, and I will update this thread with any new information about a fix. Please follow along on this thread for updates. 

Feel free to leave additional questions or concerns below. 

​@Leianne C Thank you for your response.

What you’re saying is pretty weird since PNG export doesn’t seem to have this problem…

By the way, what about the PNG quality then?

Also, which shadow exactly I should be disabling there in this document?

Hi ​@costa, thank you for following up and sorry for any confusion! The shadow applied to the dark grey background colour/shape in your document is causing extra rectangle in the PDF exports. In my testing disabling the shadow helped remove it. Would you mind giving this a try and let me know if you see the same improvement? 

For PNG quality, are you seeing the quality issue even after selecting 300 PPI for your export? Do you select crop to content when exporting as well? This will help me reproduce the issue you’re seeing on my end. 

Thank you for your help and patience. Please let me know if you have any additional questions! 

​@Leianne C 

Hello,

Yes, I’m selecting 300 PPI when exporting to PNG, I’ve just verified this and the results, it produces images of ~4800 pixels width for my document and some shape lines are missing there.

Does this sound reasonable to you? What might be the reasons and workarounds?

Thanks,
Costa.

Hi ​@costa, apologies for the delayed response as I checked this behaviour with our team for additional insight. It looks like the best workaround to exporting in higher quality is by changing the export quality to ‘Current zoom level’.

I recommend trying this by zooming into your page at 75% (our typical default zoom level) then try exporting to PNG and select ‘Current zoom level’. Please see the following community post for an example GIF demonstrating this: 

Would you mind giving this a try and let me know if you see an improvement in quality? Feel free to let me know if you have any questions!

Hi ​@costa, just wanted to share an update. It looks like our engineering team made an update and slides to PDF now respects layer settings. This should help resolve the issue which led to the need for your current workaround. 

Would you mind giving this a try and let us know if you experience any issues with it? Thank you! 

Hey ​@Leianne C , this is great news, I’ll be able to test the slide layers and the quality in a few days. Thanks!

Thank you ​@Kelsey Gaag for unarchiving this.

Now, I have checked this with my document above and found no progress with this issue (no respect for layers, nothing), moreover, I’m getting an error when trying to download PNG there now, so we’ve gone from bad to worse so far.

Hi ​@costa, thank you for the update and sorry to hear you’re experiencing issues with your document. Could you please confirm if you tested this with the ‘PDF’ or ‘Slides to PDF’ option? Please note that ‘Slides to PDF’ option will only appear if you added slides to the presentation builder. 

Our fix that our engineers released earlier in this thread is for the ‘Slides to PDF’ option. If you haven’t already, would you mind giving ‘Slides to PDF’ a try and let me know if you are still seeing issues with layers?

For the PNG download issue, would you mind sharing a screenshot of description of the error? This will help me take a closer look on my end. 

Thank you for your help and patience. Please let us know if you have any questions! 

This is the new PNG error:

And yes, I’ve got it now re: layers of slides and slides to PDF; the UX is bad for the latter (could just be an option within the existing export flow) and worse for the former (choosing layers without viewing them). Also, for my use case, (transparent background) PNGs are more important (for embedding in video presentations), PDF is just a lame workaround.

It is sad to see my charting tool of choice deteriorating like this… Do you need a better end-to-end engineering manager (I happen to be looking for my next challenge at the moment)?

Hi ​@costa, thank you for following up with that feedback. I unfortunately was not able to reproduce the export error on my end - this suggests that the error may be related to this specific document. 

Could you please share a temporary Support PIN for this document again to help our team take a closer look at the issue? 

Thank you in advance for your help and patience. Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions. 

​@Leianne C duZYoRa7c76uZE138991933 thanks

checked my issue with the latest chrome version;

also, slide layers interface is inconsistent;

also, the ghost shadow rectangle bug is still there...

Hi ​@costa, thank you for sharing the PIN. I was able to reproduce the export issue and have reported this to our development team.

In the meantime, it looks like PNG transparent background exports work correctly if you change the export quality to ‘Current zoom level’. Would you mind giving this a try and let me know if you see any improvements? 

As mentioned earlier in this thread, this is also the recommended for exporting higher quality files. This Community Post has an example GIF demonstrating this as well. 

For slide layers interface inconsistencies, would you mind sharing an example screenshot or description of what you are seeing? This will help me reproduce and locate the issue. 

For the shadow issue, our team is still actively working on this and I don’t have an update to share just yet. I know this can be frustrating, and I really appreciate your patience in the meantime. I’ll be sure to follow up as soon as we have more information.

​@Leianne C Hi, I really appreciate you trying to help, but, umm, I don’t really have time to volunteer in QA (my offer to help with tech management still stands though) -- even if it is for my still-favourite charting product.

Current zoom level -- I’m not sure if your actual QA guys tried it -- produces a really low-resolution image which is quite unusable for me.

Slide layers (within their separate selection thingy) don’t sync with the currently selected visible layers -- which is maddeningly inefficient UX.

To be honest, if there were any solid alternatives, I would have cancelled my subscription with Lucid already; as a long-time paying user, and as a veteran web app specialist, this kind of support and bug-fixing pace doesn’t make sense to me; with this issue and the RTL text issue, I’m just running out of workarounds for my usage.

Hi ​@costa, thank you for the quick response and giving that workaround a try. To get better quality, I recommending zoom in to 50% or our 75% default zoom level - please note this may take a moment depending on how large your document is. That said, I understand that this is not ideal workaround. I have shared this with our development team and will update this thread as soon as I have more information. 

For slide layers, are you referring to this option? This is available so that you can adjust the layer visibility of an individual slide in Lucidchart. 

We appreciate your collaboration as we navigate this issue. Please let me know if you have any questions! (For all job openings, feel free to check out https://lucid.co/careers!)