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ATS-Friendly PDF vs Designer PDF, explained

Every resume you build offers two different PDF downloads, made by two completely separate export engines, for two different readers.

What it does

The Designer PDF is built for a human looking at your resume on screen or in print. The ATS-Friendly PDF is built for the parsing software recruiters use before a human ever opens your file. You choose either, or both, at download time. Since 2026-09-07, every Free account gets 1 ATS-Friendly PDF download, total, at no cost — a plain, single-layout PDF with a small footer credit line ("Made with YourCVMaker · yourcvmaker.com") on it. The Designer PDF still requires Pro.

How it's made

The Designer PDF captures the rendered preview as a high-resolution image (html2canvas) and embeds it into an A4 PDF, which is what guarantees it looks pixel-identical to the live preview — any layout, any columns, any template typography. The ATS-Friendly PDF is a separate engine entirely: it draws real, selectable text runs with jsPDF into a deliberately conservative single-column layout with standard section headings, themed with your template's accent color. They share only your resume data, never a rendering pipeline — see the full breakdown of how we test the ATS format on the ATS promise page.

How to use it

  1. On the download step, look for the two PDF format options.
  2. Choose Designer PDF when the resume is going to a person reading it on screen or in print.
  3. Choose ATS-Friendly PDF when submitting through an online application system.
  4. Not sure which a company uses? Download both — most applicants do.

What you get

A resume that looks exactly the way you designed it to a person, and parses correctly to software, without having to pick one at the expense of the other.

What Free includes, and the free one-time Designer PDF for students & teachers

In short: every Free account gets 1 ATS-Friendly PDF download, total, at no cost, and a signed-in Free account with a .edu or .ac email address additionally qualifies for one free Designer PDF download. The free download is always the plain, single-layout ATS-Friendly PDF, with a small footer credit line on it; it doesn't apply to the Designer PDF, PNG or Word, which still require Pro. The academic exception is separate and narrower: a signed-in Free account whose email address is on an academic domain can additionally download exactly one Designer PDF, one time, at no cost — but it is one download in total, not one of each, and it doesn't extend to PNG or Word either.

Who qualifies is decided by the domain of the email address on your account, checked structurally — not by a manual review or a third-party verification service. The patterns recognized are any .edu address (name@mit.edu), any .ac.<country> address (name@ox.ac.uk, name@tsukuba.ac.jp), any .edu.<country> address (name@unimelb.edu.au, name@tsinghua.edu.cn), and U.S. K-12 public-school addresses of the form .k12.<state>.us. An address that merely contains "edu" or "ac" somewhere in it does not qualify, and neither do Gmail, Outlook or company addresses, even if you are a student or teacher.

The check runs in the browser and is enforced again on the server before the file is generated, against the email on the signed-in account. Once the one free Designer PDF has been used, the account is marked permanently and every later Designer/PNG/Word download follows the standard Pro requirement -- the 1 free ATS-Friendly PDF download is tracked separately and isn't affected either way. The exception doesn't change AI credits or any other Free-plan limit.