The Pencil Plugin for Figma allows you to export Figma sections as .pencil files, which you can then import directly into Pencil as templates. This enables a smooth handoff between design teams and ad generation workflows in Pencil.

Note: this plugin must be installed via the Figma Desktop app. It does not work in the browser.

Your plugin should now appear under the plugins you have available in Figma.

The plugin converts a Section in Figma into a Template in Pencil. Each top-level Frame inside the section becomes a Format within that template.

Important: Only first-level frames inside each format are imported. Everything within them will be flattened into a single image, unless structured properly (see examples below).

It’s critical to understand these limitations, otherwise any text layer that is not on the root level of a frame won’t be editable in Pencil.

Once you launch the plugin in Figma, you'll be prompted to select a section from your design file. After selecting a section, the plugin will display a real-time preview of how that content will appear in Pencil.

During this preview phase, you can:

Note: Some minor adjustments may be required to match your original layout precisely — especially for text layers, where positioning may need to be fine-tuned manually.

This step allows you to ensure the best possible fidelity between your Figma designs and the final template experience in Pencil.

If your Figma section contains a single frame with multiple nested elements (e.g. images, text), everything inside will be flattened into one image layer in Pencil.

Why? Because Pencil imports only the first level of items inside each Format.

With the right structure, you can preserve editable layers like text and shapes.

This structure keeps your text editable and shapes scalable.

If you want to preserve mask effects, make sure to group the mask and the target layer together in Figma.

Failing to group them will result in the mask not being applied when imported into Pencil.

Remember that you want the editable parts creative, specially text, to be on the top layer

Before installing the newest version of the plug-in, it is important to have the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app installed on your device and to make sure that you do not have a previous version of the plug-in installed. If you do, it can be uninstalled from the Creative Cloud plug-in menu by selecting by selecting the plug-in options button as shown below:

Next, download the plug-in from the link at the top of this article, find it in your downloads folder and open it.

The plug-in installer will open in Creative Cloud and you will need to press Install and then accept the permissions on the subsequent screen.

When you next open the Photoshop application, there will be a blue banner confirming installation of the plug-in:

From the plug-ins menu in your top navigation bar, select Pencil Export Layers and choose Export.

This will open up the plug-in, select Extract and Export PSD Layers to proceed to the layers tool.

You will now see a preview of the .pencil file that will be produced. By pressing Compare with original beneath the preview, you can overlay your Photoshop file with the export to check that placement of assets is pixel-perfect.

In the menu to the right, you can change the order of layers, toggle editability of layers and set layer types.

When a layer is set as editable you can access additional formatting tools. For example, for text layers, this enables you to tweak the size, color, spacing, formatting, rotation, alignment, position and dimension of the layer.

Finally, when you press the blue Export PSD Layers button, you will be able to choose your export location, and then after the export processes, you will see confirmation screen with a link to a Google Sheet file containing a summary of the text layers in your export.

Finally, you need to navigate to the template library of your workspace. In the top right corner, you can find the Import Templates button. This will take you to your file browser to select the file that you want to import. Please note that this will be in a .pencil format.

Once you have selected your .pencil file, simply press open/upload and your file will be added to the template library as a fully editable static template. You can then refine this further or use the template to start generating ads right away!