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[SOLVED] Formatting options for Long Text

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Arlo_Haskell
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect
Status: Launched

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 canโ€™t properly format the titles of their books.

The markdown formatting tools available in this Airtable community message editor would be perfect.

154 Comments
Richard_Brown
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

+1 This would allow us to save related documentation to a workflow management process weโ€™re building. Documentation field would contain bullet lists, headings etc. Ideally weโ€™d be able to expose this through api onto a webpage - as such basic html tags would be really helpful.

Thomas_Holth
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Another vote from me. Markdown in long text would be great!

Mike_Schinkel
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Is this even being considered? We are evaluating AirTable and this is a major need for us.

How about a new field type, a Markdown field that would cause you not to have to worry about screwing up existing long text content?

Adam_Berenzweig
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Yes! and specifically with lists, todo lists with checkboxes please!

  • [ ] add checkboxes support in long description markdown text.
  • [ ] enjoy!
William_Nutt
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Please add Markdown support!

Frank_Arnold
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Yes, it would be nice to see some basic text formatting at least in the long text field.

It doesnโ€™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.
Itโ€™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 doesnโ€™t need modifications in the GUI!

It needs only a small improvement in the text renderer so that such special chars like โ€œ*โ€ or โ€œ1.โ€ 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.

Clifford_Fajard
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Cmon airtable! Implementing this shouldnโ€™t be difficult & itโ€™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 yaโ€™ll operate at a large scale, but you also have fantastic engineersโ€ฆ

Robert_Hyndes
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Any thoughts from airtable on this?

Stephanie_C
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

In the mean while couldnโ€™t you create a zap to convert the text to markdown using the formatter native app to Zapier? Just a thoughtโ€ฆ

David_Krizan
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

I, and many others that Iโ€™ve talked to, would like the ability to add a Rich Text field to tables. Much like this box that Iโ€™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 yโ€™all could do a much better job (e.g., your Description block functionality as a Rich Text field type).

Notion example:
image