I would love to see basic text formatting options for the long text field. At a minimum: bold and italic formatting would be a huge help.
I would like to use long text fields to store short bios for writers. But without the ability to have italic formatting, I can’t properly format the titles of their books.
The markdown formatting tools available in this Airtable community message editor would be perfect.
+1 This would allow us to save related documentation to a workflow management process we’re building. Documentation field would contain bullet lists, headings etc. Ideally we’d be able to expose this through api onto a webpage - as such basic html tags would be really helpful.
Yes, it would be nice to see some basic text formatting at least in the long text field.
It doesn’t need an extra editor, Trello shows a good solution with some shortcuts or special chars which are automatically translated to HTML elements like lists, italic or bold text and different font size.
It’s also a good idea to support URL formatting in the text like [text](URL) which will be a replaced with the HTML code for links. So it doesn’t need modifications in the GUI!
It needs only a small improvement in the text renderer so that such special chars like “*” or “1.” are replaced with HTML formatting code. This can be easy done with some regular expressions and is no rocket science!
A good developer can implement such easy features in a day, so it should not be something which it needs a lot of man power or big plan for years.
Cmon airtable! Implementing this shouldn’t be difficult & it’s already been done by Trello and other similar apps like Zenkit. On the client-side, once you fetch the long text data, you can just parse the long text field with a clientside markdown parser from npmjs.com or create your own.
This markdown it parser is good & supports everything you need: https://markdown-it.github.io/
A prototype can be done in hours and you can definitely get this done in less than month. I know that ya’ll operate at a large scale, but you also have fantastic engineers…
I, and many others that I’ve talked to, would like the ability to add a Rich Text field to tables. Much like this box that I’m typing into right now or like the Description block, having the ability it would be nice to be able to have a field type that allows rich text editing at a record level.
There are numerous use cases and a field like this could even replace my need for a knowledge base tool or wiki (e.g, Confluence), or attaching files like PDFs or Word docs. Another obvious use case would be for detailed notes (e.g., usability test/interview session notes, meeting notes, troubleshooting documentation).
Also, one of your competitors (Notion.so) is offering something similar and I think y’all could do a much better job (e.g., your Description block functionality as a Rich Text field type).
