Page Designer PDF Output Not Text Characters

[Bryan_Smith]

I’m trying to copy and paste content out of PDF files generated from Airtable Page Designer Block and having problems. Opening the pdf in illustrator reveals that there is no text content in the PDF, just vector elements. Am I missing a setting here, this would lead to huge PDF files that are fairly useless for sharing data. Anyone else notice this?

[John-Paul_Kerno]

Am I the only person having difficulties with Page Designer? I set up a page with 8 fields and two images on each page and watched this fail to print again and again. The generation of 46 individual pages simply chomps through 12 GB of available RAM and 3GB of Hard Disk and crashes.

Then there is the issue of actually generating the page itself which is very time consuming as items cannot be selected and moved together. Further, when attachments are included on a page as picture items these are truncated top and bottom.

Surely report printing - even to PDF - is a priority?

[Bryan_Smith]

I just posted this regarding the PDF output. I bet this is part of your problem.

Page Designer PDF Output Not Text Characters Ask the community

I’m trying to copy and paste content out of PDF files generated from Airtable Page Designer Block and having problems. Opening the pdf in illustrator reveals that there is no text content in the PDF, just vector elements. Am I missing a setting here, this would lead to huge PDF files that are fairly useless for sharing data. Anyone else notice this?

[drassi]

If I print as PDF from page designer, all of my text is selectable, “printing” from Chrome on OSX and opening in Preview or Chrome. The only non-selectable text in my blocks is for single-select fields—those display colored with borders. If you want to fix that specific issue, just make a formula field with the single select text and use that instead. I believe Page Designer is largely designed to display data, not to share raw data, I would recommend download CSV for sharing data.

[Bryan_Smith]

Thank you for your reply.

I’m actually getting mixed results depending on the base. However my test is with single line text field, not select fields. Here is a test document with a single field put into a list format.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lpFcHnscf9i65RI8etFQqzUj25G-_-YA

The odd thing is the text is selectable in the preview but not in the pdf. On another base I did a test and got character based text in the PDF.

Thanks also for suggestion of csv but that is not relevant here. Text in PDF output should be characters, not vectors, which is what I’m getting sometimes. I understand the use of csv but that doesn’t address the problem I’m having.

I also tried Microsoft Print to PDF & Save as PDF drivers (I have 2 pdf output options) both with the same results.

[Drop_Bled]

Why don’t people just use Word?

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

Because there is no direct integration between Airtable and Word.

I have a bit of experience with doing a mail merge in Word, and while it is doable, the workflow is cumbersome, especially if you can get the job done in Airtable.

On the other hand, Page Designer does have some serious limitations, and sometimes a mail merge with Word is the way to go.