Page Designer: exported PDF fils are now much bigger. Is it only me? If yes, why?

I’d try to isolate whether Page Designer is rasterizing the whole output differently now, or whether one field/image is causing the jump.

A few checks that usually narrow this down quickly:

1. Export a one-page copy of the same template. If one page is already huge, it is likely an image/rendering/compression issue rather than the number of rows.
2. Replace the image fields with a tiny placeholder and export again. If the file drops back down, pre-compress the source images before they reach Airtable, because PDF generators sometimes embed a much larger source image than what is visible on the page.
3. Compare Chrome “Save as PDF” vs the system print dialog/export path. A browser or print-pipeline change can make text/images rasterize differently.
4. Check whether any new long-text/rich-text fields include pasted images or hidden formatting.
5. If the price list is 30-50 pages, consider moving the final rendering outside Page Designer when you need strict compression and page-break control, then save the final PDF back to an attachment field.

Maker disclosure: I build Pdfier around that last Airtable-to-PDF pattern (https://pdfier.app/), but for this specific issue I would first test the image/rasterization path above before rebuilding the workflow.

I’d run an analysis on known rows. I don’t think Airtable is working on Page designer since past few years. It is a stable product. Quite likely there’s an image or some other object/font etc that is causing the bloat. Check file-sizes. Maybe try using an image compression tool to reduce image file sizes and regenerate.

​@Maicol 

You may want to email support@airtable.com about the issue you’re having, and see what they say.

However, note that Airtable isn’t creating your PDF files — your computer is. So there is probably very little that Airtable Support will be able to do for you, outside of telling you to check the PDF creation process that you are currently using on your own computer.

All of this is because Airtable has ZERO ability to create PDF files, which is one of the limitations of both Airtable and Page Designer.

Page Designer has dozens of other limitations too (see partial list below) — and Page Designer isn’t actively being improved by Airtable anymore — so it would probably be the better long-term strategy to switch to a 3rd-party app like ​@Jonghyun_Oh’s PDFier, which he mentioned above.

Other great 3rd-party PDF creation tools that you can turn to include:

• DocsAutomator
• Typeflow
• DocuMint
• Fillout, which lets you generate PDF files from form submissions
• You can also use Make’s integrations — which can be integrated with any PDF-creation app of your choosing, such as CraftMyPDF.
  
  You can even integrate Make with something as simple as custom Microsoft Word documents or custom Google Docs documents, and automatically export them as PDF files.
  
  If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the many different ways that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

Here is a partial list of limitations with Airtable’s Page Designer:

• Page Designer can’t be automated in any way.
• Page Designer doesn’t work in interfaces.
• Page Designer can’t create PDF files on its own — you need to use your computer’s print or PDF functions for that.
• Page Designer can’t insert documents into attachment fields. You have to do this manually.
• Page Designer can’t elegantly handle documents that aren’t exactly one page in length.
• Page Designer layouts can’t be copied to other tables or bases.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the world’s best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Turns out changing browser did the trick :) 

Chrome somehow started making donwloads much bigger...for once Safari did the job.

Thanks to both!

Glad you found a fix! For future reference - if you're generating 30-50 page price lists with images, Page Designer will keep hitting these limits. It wasn't built for multi-page documents at scale.

With TypeFlow (mentioned by ​@ScottWorld  above), you can generate price lists directly from your Airtable data using a Google Docs or HTML/CSS template. Images stay compressed, file sizes stay
predictable, and you can automate the whole thing so it regenerates whenever you update products.

Here's a quick guide on generating multi-page PDFs from Airtable without Page Designer