PDF exports

Exporting your storyboard as a PDF makes it easy to share your work with clients, collaborators, or anyone reviewing your project. The PDF exporter gives you control over layout, image sizing, font and branding, before it’s sent out to present or review.

See also: PDF in Exports, an overview of the PDF export and the other formats.

Accessing the PDF exporter

Open your storyboard and click Export in the header. From the list of options, choose PDF.

This opens the PDF export settings, where you can customise the layout, styling, and content of your document.

Custom covers

PDF exports support front and back covers, allowing you to brand or title your storyboard export.

Upload your own cover pages if you already have them.

Or use the cover builder to add your logo. Upload your logo and Boords will generate a cover page for you automatically.

If you don't want a front cover, choose No front cover.

Choose a layout

Choose how frames are arranged in your storyboard by selecting from a range of layout options:

• Six frame grid
• Eight frame grid (with Widescreen ticked)
• Four frame grid
• Three up
• Two up
• Frame list
• Full page
• Two Columns

The layouts on offer depend on your frames' shape. Portrait (9:16) and 4:5 frames use Three up.

You can also fine-tune the layout using the controls below:

• Image size. Choose a percentage from 40 to 100%, in steps of 10, to control how large your images appear on the page.

• Widescreen option. Check the widescreen box to enable a wider layout. With widescreen enabled, the Eight frame grid layout becomes available. Pages are A4 landscape otherwise. Frame list always prints on A4 portrait, so the Widescreen option is hidden for it.

Fonts

Customise how your PDF looks by changing the background colour, text colour, font and font size. Fonts support multiple languages.

Frame settings

Frame settings let you control how frames appear in the exported PDF, giving you more flexibility over the final look of your storyboard.

You can show or hide image borders, label text, frame numbers and field icons, and choose whether empty frames show a placeholder. This makes it easy to create a cleaner presentation or include more detail, depending on who you’re sharing the storyboard with.

Footer customisation

The footer can be customised to match your project or brand:

• Upload a footer logo
• Show or hide the version number
• Show or hide page numbers
• Show or hide the document name

Downloading your PDF

Click Export when you are happy with the settings. Keep the window open while your browser generates the document.

When the preview is ready, click Download PDF to save it to your device. The confirmation then says Please check your downloads folder. You can use Back to export settings to make changes and export again.

Download every storyboard in a project

When a campaign is ready for sign-off, you can send the client every board at once. Open the project, click the three-dot menu next to the project name and choose Download all as PDF. To download only some storyboards, select their cards and click Download as PDF in the toolbar at the bottom.

Boords shows how many storyboards it will export. Click Download and keep the tab open until the download starts. Each storyboard downloads as its latest version with its own PDF settings, and the PDFs arrive together in one ZIP file. Very large projects download as several ZIP files. If your browser asks to allow multiple downloads, allow them.

Archived storyboards, older versions and storyboards in sub-projects aren't included. If a storyboard can't be exported, the dialog lists it and the ZIP includes a failed-exports.txt file.

Downloading a project or a selection as PDFs is available on paid plans and during a trial. Trial PDFs are watermarked previews, as they are for a single export. It isn't available on the Free plan.

Watermarks

On the Free plan, every page of the PDF carries a "Boords.com • Free Version" watermark. Upgrade to a paid plan to remove it.

During a trial, PDFs are watermarked previews with lower-resolution images, and the file name ends in _preview. PDFs from paid plans have no watermark.