How to send a logo to a printer

27 September 2026 · Pathside guides

Pathside opens .ai, .eps, .svg and PDF on the phone →

What file format does a printer want for a logo?

Print shops and design studios giving public advice on this are unusually consistent, and as of September 2026 they say much the same thing: send a vector file, which in practice means .ai, .eps, or a PDF that came out of drawing software. Several of them go further and name EPS as the safest single attachment when you do not know what software the printer runs, because almost every professional print application will open one.

SVG sits slightly outside that list. It is genuinely vector, and some printers take it happily, but the guidance you will find treats it as the web format of the group and suggests a PDF or an EPS as the safer thing to put in an email to a press. If an SVG is all you have, send it and say so.

The one honest answer underneath all of this: ask. A printer who is about to put your mark on five hundred items would much rather answer one sentence about file formats than deal with the wrong file on the day.

Why the printer asked for “the vector”

A vector file stores the drawing as instructions — points, curves, fills — so whatever prints it works the pixels out fresh at the size being printed. A raster file such as a PNG or a JPG is a fixed grid of coloured squares, and enlarging it cannot invent detail that was never recorded. That is the whole reason the request exists: the printer does not know yet whether your logo is going on a business card or a van, and the vector covers both without anybody making a decision.

It also explains why they will not simply accept the picture you already have. If you are not sure which kind of file you were sent, how to tell if a file is vector is the shorter way to settle it than asking the designer again.

What to attach, in order

1. The original vector file, exactly as it was sent to you — same name, unrenamed, uncompressed if your mail client will allow it.
2. A PDF of the same artwork, if the person who drew it can produce one. It opens on practically anything, and it lets the printer check they are seeing what you are seeing.
3. A PNG preview, a few hundred pixels wide. Nobody prints from it. It exists so that the first thing the printer sees when they open the email is the logo, not a file they have to launch software to inspect.

What matters more than the list is that these are all the same artwork. Attaching a vector from one round of revisions and a preview from another is how the wrong version gets printed while everyone believes they checked it.

What to write in the email

Four lines cover almost everything a printer would otherwise have to come back and ask:

• Which file is the artwork, by name. “Print from acme-logo-horizontal.ai; the PNG is only a preview.”
• Which version, if the file holds several. Brand files routinely carry a full-colour lockup, a single-colour one, a reversed one and an icon on separate artboards, and “the logo” does not identify one.
• The colours, if you have been told them. Print guidance is consistent that a Pantone or spot-colour reference alongside CMYK values gives every supplier the same target, and that without one each vendor mixes its own approximation — which is how business cards and signage slowly stop matching. If you were never given those references, say that too rather than guessing.
• The finished size, and what it is going on. A printer can work out the rest from that.

You do not need to convert anything yourself. From a phone you almost certainly cannot, and a printer converting a file they were given correctly is routine work, whereas a printer guessing at your intentions is not.

Do you need to outline the fonts?

This is the other question printers ask, and the reason is specific: live text in a file depends on the font being installed wherever it is opened, and when it is missing the software substitutes something else. Outlining converts the letters into ordinary vector shapes, so there is no font to be missing and no substitution to notice too late.

It is worth knowing that it is not always necessary. Several print-industry sources make the point that a PDF with its fonts properly embedded prints correctly without outlining, and that outlining also throws away the ability to fix a typo cheaply. So the useful move is not to do it, but to ask: “is the text outlined, or do you need it outlined?” The person who drew the logo can answer in seconds, and it is a cheap question now and an expensive one after the run.

What if all you have is a PNG or a JPG?

Then say so immediately, before the printer discovers it. A raster logo can be printed, but only at roughly the size it was made for — and a screenshot is only ever as large as the screen it was taken from, which is rarely enough for anything physical. What size to export a logo at covers the arithmetic if you need to work out whether what you have is big enough.

The better route is almost always to go back to whoever produced the logo and ask for “the .ai, the .eps, or a PDF straight from the drawing software”. That is a request any designer understands. If the file you are chasing turns out to be a CorelDRAW document, the CDR guide explains what to ask for instead, since few programs outside CorelDRAW read that format well.

One thing to avoid: the online services that offer to turn a PNG into a vector automatically. They will produce something, and for a flat logo it is sometimes usable, but the result is a new drawing that only approximates the original — and the file goes to somebody else's server on the way.

Check the file before it leaves your phone

The cheapest moment to catch a mistake is before the email is sent. Open the file, zoom in far enough to see the edges, step through the artboards so you know which one you are naming, and read the text slowly. Checking a logo before it goes to print goes through what actually goes wrong between approval and the press, including the one thing a phone screen genuinely cannot judge, which is colour.

Pathside is built for exactly that moment. It opens .ai, .pdf, .svg and .svgz on the phone — and .eps when that file carries a PDF inside it, which not every EPS does, so it says so plainly when there is none. It decides what a file is by reading its first bytes rather than trusting the name, which matters in a category where files get renamed constantly. Opening, zooming and stepping through artboards are free, and nothing you open is sent anywhere: it behaves identically in aeroplane mode.

What it will not do is stand in for the vector. Its exports are renderings rather than the drawing itself: PNG or JPG at 1024, 2048 or 4096 pixels on the long edge, or a one-page PDF at the artwork's own size, all behind a one-time unlock. That is what a preview attachment is, and it is a good use of them. The file the press works from should still be the one the designer made.

What not to send

• A screenshot of the logo. It captures a screen's worth of pixels and discards the artwork.
• A JPG where transparency matters. JPG has no alpha channel, so a logo meant to sit on a colour arrives with a white box behind it.
• A logo pasted into a document. What comes out the other side is usually a compressed, resized copy.
• Five files with no explanation. If the printer has to pick, they will pick the one that opens easily, which is frequently the preview.

The one-line version

Send the file the designer made, attach a small PNG so everyone can see it, name which file and which artboard you mean, and pass on the colour references if you have them. Everything else is the printer's job, and they are better at it than a phone is.