FROM PRODUCTION
A club logo inside the jersey number
The club wants its logo on the number too. It is nothing big, just a small mark at the foot of the digit. And that is exactly why it is work that goes badly by hand.
Put the logo in the number. A sentence a designer hears once a season and one that sounds like five minutes of work. It is not, and not because moving a logo somewhere is hard.
It is not one placement, it is ten
The logo sits at the bottom, at the foot of the digit. Except every digit has its foot somewhere else. On a one it is the bottom of the stem, on a zero the middle of the lower curve, on a seven the end of the diagonal. Ten digits means ten different positions and not one of them can be derived from the previous one.
On top of that, numbers have one, two or three digits, and everything changes with the jersey size. A logo that sits right on an XXL is too big on a child size.
By hand it works, it is just extra work on every piece
You take the logo, place it into the number, nudge it, check it does not collide with the stroke of the digit, and adjust the size. Then again for the next player, because their number is different. And then once more for every size.
Ten players in three sizes is thirty such placements and every one of them is a judgment call. That is exactly the kind of work where you stop looking properly by the last few pieces.
How exportPDF does it
The point is that you set the position once and visually. No coordinates are typed in, nothing is estimated.
- You tell the script which text field is the reference. Typically the back number for the medium size, that is
NumberBack_M, and it has to have exactly the font and size the numbers are meant to have on the finished jersey. - The logo has to be saved in the document as a symbol.
- On confirmation the script creates a non-printing layer and on it reference digits zero to nine, which take the font and size from that field, plus one instance of your logo next to each of them.
- All you do then is drag each logo where you want it in relation to that digit. Where you put it is where it really goes at export.
At export the script compares the font size in the target field with the reference, works out the ratio and scales the logo by it. So it takes care of the logo looking the same on a child shirt and on an XXL. The spacing between the reference digits can be adjusted in the advanced settings if it gets in the way while positioning.
The setup is a one-off. When that club comes back a year later, you open the file and just run the export.
Where it has limits
Three things it is better to know in advance than to hit in the middle of an order.
A logo and graphic digits do not combine. Either your numbers are built from your own graphic symbols, or you insert a logo into them. Both at once is not possible, neither in Illustrator nor in CorelDRAW.
Only so much of the reference text is read. Font, size, fill color and stroke yes. A more complex appearance that you set on the text through the Appearance panel, no. The newly created items then carry the original basic color and need adjusting by hand.
Rotated text. The back panel is usually rotated in print files and sleeve numbers lie on their side. For the logo the script handles ninety, a hundred and eighty and two hundred and seventy degrees.
When every player has a different sponsor
One more feature belongs to the same family. Sometimes it is not the club that found a sponsor, but the individual players. Each has someone else on their jersey and some have nobody. By hand that means switching layers on and off on every piece and watching that the previous player’s sponsor does not stay behind.
The script takes it from the spreadsheet. You put the name of the graphic in a column and it shows it on that piece, and shows nothing where the cell is empty. If it cannot find the name in the template, it writes that in the log and carries on, so one typo does not stop the whole export.
The price is the preparation. All the variants have to be placed in the template in advance, and for each size separately, because the script only shows and hides them, it does not lay them out. It is not an everyday feature. But the moment you need it, there is a difference between watching visibility by hand on twenty jerseys and having it in one column.
When it is worth it
When the logo goes into the numbers repeatedly. For one single jersey you will place it by hand faster than you will set up the reference. The break-even is the same as with everything around templates: the moment the same template is used a second time, the preparation has paid off.
What exportPDF is
A script for batch export of personalized PDFs from Illustrator and from CorelDRAW. I have been writing it since 2025 for my own production and I use it daily. The demo is free, limited by the number of runs and the number of rows in the spreadsheet.
More: the Illustrator version · the CorelDRAW version · pricing and licenses. Related: what a whole order looks like from spreadsheet to PDFs and what to do with a font that has no accents.
I have been developing the exportPDF script since 2025. It came out of my own need and I use it daily in my own production. If you are dealing with the same thing, write to me, a consultation is free and I reply within 24 hours. The whole story
Aleš Ulrych
info@exportpdf.cz
