What are the PDF requirements for a LinkedIn carousel?

Most of these requirements trace back to the fact that carousel PDFs were never designed for print, even though the PDF format itself was built with print in mind. Design tools sometimes default to CMYK color mode, which is calibrated for ink on paper — on a screen, CMYK colors render noticeably duller and slightly shifted compared to the same values in RGB, which is how every digital display actually renders color. Exporting in RGB from the start avoids that mismatch entirely.

Consistent page size and orientation matters because LinkedIn's viewer expects a uniform document — if one page is a different size than the rest, it can scale, crop, or add unexpected margins to keep the whole file rendering as a single coherent unit. The same logic applies to font handling: if a PDF references a font by name instead of embedding or flattening it into the design, the file only displays correctly on a system that already has that font installed. LinkedIn's rendering servers don't have every custom or brand font available, so an unembedded font can quietly substitute to a generic fallback, and the carousel comes out looking noticeably different from how it was designed.

Password protection simply blocks LinkedIn's system from reading the file at all, so protected PDFs typically fail to upload outright. CarouseLabs' exports meet all of these requirements automatically — RGB color, embedded fonts, and consistent page dimensions across every slide — so there's no separate export-settings step to get right before uploading.

Key Points

• Export in RGB color mode, not CMYK — CMYK renders dull and shifted on screens
• Keep every page the same size and orientation to avoid LinkedIn scaling or cropping mismatched pages
• Embed or flatten fonts so custom typefaces don't silently substitute on LinkedIn's rendering servers
• Stay under the 100MB document limit and avoid password-protected files, which typically fail to upload

Example

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