Big performance boosts and new font embedding options — what's new in Sketch?

We’ve always aimed to make Sketch flexible and powerful. And over the years, as we’ve added more functionality, documents have gotten bigger and more complex — which can make a difference to performance. We know this can have a huge impact on your workflow. So we’ve been listening carefully to your feedback on this, and we’ve spent the last few months working hard on measuring and improving performance across the app. In this release, that’s paying off in a big way.

It all starts with Symbols. They’re at the heart of every design system, so we’ve made working with Symbols feel smoother and more responsive than ever — especially in complex documents with lots of instances. You’ll notice that deeply nested Symbols and Smart Layout are faster, too. You can find out more about how we did this in our Speeding up Symbols post.

We’ve also fixed some particular performance bottlenecks around shadows, as well as Layers with background blur and saturation. The team really focused on pushing performance here, and their hard work has paid off. Take a look at this comparison to see exactly what we mean.

You’ll also see improvements in documents with lots of Slices, particularly when you’re zoomed in on content. These are just a few of the performance upgrades we’ve made in this release, but there’s plenty more going on behind the scenes — and they all add up to a serious speed boost in your daily workflow.

In future releases, we’ll continue to focus on improving performance across the board — from low-level rendering, to specific bottlenecks, like we did in this release. Stay tuned for more updates on this.

Embedding fonts in documents

With this release, we’re introducing the option to embed fonts in individual documents. This should make it easier to share documents with others, both on the Mac and on Cloud.

In the Mac app, it means whoever you share your document with will be able to open and edit it as if they have the fonts installed — even if they don’t. And if you’re sharing files on Cloud, text layers will all render exactly as you see them in the Mac app.

You can do this in any document by choosing Text > Document Fonts… and selecting the fonts you want to embed. It’s important to note that you’ll only be able to embed non-system fonts.

We respect and value the work of font creators in the design community. So, before you embed any font, you must make sure you own the correct license, including the rights to distribute it. We’ll ask you to confirm this before you embed. Please be aware that some font vendors do not allow users to transfer, display or distribute their fonts — and our terms of service prohibit embedding fonts without the correct license.

If you find that someone has embedded your font into a document on Cloud without the proper rights, please contact us and we’ll remove it from our systems.

Documents window improvements

With this release, we’re also making it easier for you to manage your Cloud docs on the Mac app. From simple things, like renaming and deleting Cloud documents from the Documents window, to the ability to drag-and-drop local Sketch documents onto the Documents window to upload them to Cloud. If you’re moving older documents to Cloud, drag-and-drop supports multiple documents at the same time, making the move a breeze.

You’ll be able to rename and confirm the document is in the right team or project before you upload. And if you drag a document into a Libraries tab, it will become a Cloud Library automatically. Alternatively, you can turn any Cloud document into a Cloud Library from the File menu of the Mac app.

More updates, improvements and fixes

• Better emoji — Using emoji in your text layers no longer stretches the line height and vertical rhythm of your layers. 🙌 So you can sprinkle emoji wherever you want, and everything will still align perfectly. 🎉
• Smarter Select All — Select All is now more context-aware. By default, it now selects all layers in your current group. Using Select All again will extend that selection to layers in the next group up. Using Select All with an Artboard selected will select all Artboards instead, and when you’ve select layers from two or more Artboards, Select All will select the contents of all Artboards.
• Simpler exports — For our developer friends, we’ve added a new --suffixing option for the Sketchtool export layers command. Using this option makes it possible to export non-uniquely named layers without one overwriting the other.
• A color picker tweak — We’ve tweaked the size and spacing of the fill mode buttons in the color picker. That might not seem release note-worthy, but we did it to make room for an exciting update coming soon. That’s all we’re saying for now.
• Crash and bug fixes — As always, we’ve squashed some pesky bugs and fixed some unexpected crashes.

Version 67 of the Mac app is available as an update right now — you can read a full set of release notes at sketch.com/releases/mac.

We hope you’ll enjoy these latest updates to Sketch. We’re always listening to your feedback, so if you have any questions or run into any issues, please get in touch and let us know.