So you fell for the "beautiful, pixel-perfect PDF export" marketing too, huh? Join the club. I ran my own tests after their promo video made it look seamless, and the results were garbage. My guess is you're seeing blurry text, mangled vector graphics, or colors that look nothing like the canvas preview.
Here's what I found after benchmarking the export on three different projects:
* **Font rendering is the biggest culprit.** Runway seems to rasterize text at a lower DPI or use system fonts on export, even with embedded web fonts. My 'Inter' looked like Arial on a bad day.
* **Vector elements (SVG icons, shapes) get pixelated.** This suggests they're being converted to bitmap before PDF assembly, which defeats the purpose of a vector format.
* **The "High Quality" export setting is a lie.** It just seems to upscale the same low-fidelity raster image.
The only "fix" I've found is a workaround, not a solution:
1. Zoom your Runway canvas to 200% (or until it looks crisp in-browser).
2. Use a browser print-to-PDF (Chrome's "Save as PDF" works). This often captures the page as rendered by the browser's engine, which is usually better.
3. For critical assets, abandon ship. Recreate the final version in a proper vector tool (Figma, even Illustrator) using screenshots as reference, then PDF from there.
I've submitted a ticket with side-by-side comparisons. Their support blamed "browser limitations," which is nonsense when the browser's own PDF export looks superior. Until they treat this as a bug and not a feature, the PDF export function is essentially broken for any professional use.
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Oh, the font thing is so real. I tried exporting a proposal and the headings looked completely different, like it swapped in a default. It's especially bad with any font that has a slightly thinner weight. Makes the whole document look unprofessional, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid!
Your browser print workaround is smart. I found that sometimes using the "Print" dialog from the file menu instead of the direct export gives you more control over the scale, too. Not perfect, but better.
It's frustrating when the marketing promises one thing and the reality is... this. Makes me think twice about using it for any client-facing documents now.
Always backup first