Resolution of attachment preview in interface

Sigh I had this exact same problem.  I even tried to use Omni to create a new element to handle this but maximum height of custom elements is the same as the height of the attachment preview, so it was still too fuzzy:

Hopefully someone else has a solve, and in the meantime you may want to submit this as a feature suggestion to via the official form: https://community.airtable.com/p/product-ideas

I have two thoughts: One is, you might try using the Blank Canvas interface which uses a lot of legacy elements, but you have more control over the size and placement of the fields you need. In the newer interfaces, you might be able to stretch an attachment field a little wider, but you’re essentially locked into the overall size. In the Blank Canvas view, you can make the attachment field larger so that you can potentially see more information without having to click into the PDF. This may still affect the image quality, however, so I’m not sure if this is the right fit, but it might be interesting to experiment with this to see if it works. 

My other thought is whether or not you could be using AI to look at your PDFs. If there are specific elements you’re looking for in the PDF, like a vendor name, contract price, payment terms, specific clauses, etc. you could set up an AI field to analyze the PDF and output those details into the fields you need. Or if you still want folks on your team to be plugging in values for specific fields, you could have AI at least pull the details you need into a text box that’s easier to peruse and pull from. 

Not sure if either of those does exactly what you’re looking for though, but those were the first things that popped up as possible solutions. 

​@Stephen_Biegner Ooh thank you very much, the blank layout works great and the preview’s clear enough for data entry!

Thanks, Stephen! I really appreciate your putting thought into this. As great at AI can be, it’s not always accurate in extraction, and so we really want a person to look at the pdf itself. Our billing documents are complex, and it uses a lot of resources to set up the agent fields for all the different iterations we’ve got going on.

I didn’t use the blank canvas because the whole workflow starts with a list of billing documents, and I was avoiding the user having to use a record picker to pull up the information for each document. The other limitation of the blank canvas is that you can’t have tab navigation, or hide fields and groups according to logic, so it’s a trade-off. Maybe I’ll try setting up a blank canvas up again and let my user decide what they prefer.

If you can think of a way to navigate from a list to a specific record in a blank canvas interface page, that’d be another solution!
 

Oh! That’s a potential idea, and is actually really simple. You could set up an interface that is a list view of all of the projects that need to be completed. One of the fields in the list view could be a Button field that directs you to the specific record in the Blank Canvas interface. 

To do that, you just need to add a Button field in the table with the records you need to reference, and then concatenate the Blank Canvas interface link and the record ID. For the interface link, open up the Blank Canvas, select a record with the record picker, and then highlight everything in the URL through the = sign. Then, in the button field, it’s just a simple concatenate:

‘https://yourlink.com/fsdlkjf=’ & RecordID()

Here’s what it looks like in my test base:

You can plug that button into the list view, and then folks can toggle back over to the PDF when they need. You can probably reverse this process and have a “Return to List View” button that does the same thing. 

Not sure if that helps, but if your users aren’t as concerned about hiding fields or using the blank canvas interface, that would be a way to have a little bit of the best of both worlds. Let me know if you have any other questions, or if this works for you. Thanks!

Hi,
Just in case you didn’t find it yet - it helped me with the similar case.
Clicking on the left from Attachment file Title opens menu where you can move field labels on top and get more width for document.

Oh, thanks for noting that! I saw it in passing, but I didn’t try changing it.