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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
jn08
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

That would be my use case as well. Book publishing needs blurbs (or book descriptions) that often contain italics or bold. Iโ€™m currently using a workaround that I sourced via Upwork where I use my own markdown (brackets for bold and braces for italics) and then pull the text out via the API and insert it into a Word doc and convert it to actual italics and bold for various document types I need. Itโ€™s a lot more labour intensive than it needs to be, especially given the page designer block. Iโ€™m not sure how people are using the page designer block without in-built italics and bold in some kind of markdown field.

David_Griswold
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Another use case would be if someone was using the product as a CRM solution. If I wanted to take notes on a call or a person, the ability to use markdown formatting would really help with organizing information in a way that is more structured using lists, headings, and italics. Maybe it could be a new field type or a block enabling markdown support and display when the record is expanded.

Iyas_AlQasem
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

+1 for this. Bold, underline and bullets for sure, but I have a number of other uses Iโ€™d want to put it to. E.g.

  1. I send emails into my table, and at the moment, they can look hideous and undecipherable. It would be really useful to maintain the formatting.
  2. Iโ€™d like to be able to put an editable table into the long-text field.
stephan_tran
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

+1 for this feature- Submitted such a long time agoโ€ฆ

Oliver_Perez
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

+1 for markdown, this is a must-have for platforms like Airtable.

Chris_Lu
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Weโ€™re still desperate for this one. It would open up a tonne of possibilities for us. Particularly with regards to the Page Builder, which is useless to us without rich text.

HCI_Design
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

+1. It would be great to have some way of formatting the contents of a cell/long text.

This isnโ€™t ideal, and possibly of side interest to some, but if anyoneโ€™s trying to use AirTable to produce a dynamic webpage/site (e.g. see here), they can use CSS styling to โ€˜parseโ€™ the carriage returns in a Long Text field and replace them with line breaks.

Just use the css style `white-space: pre-wrap;โ€™. Wrap any AirTable field youโ€™re inserting into a HTML page with a class that has โ€˜white-space: pre-wrapโ€™ for styling. e.g.

In HTML:

<p class=โ€œwโ€>
<!โ€“insert the AirTable Long Text here.โ€“>
</p>

In CSS:

p.w {
white-space: pre-wrap;
}

You could do the same for italics and bold text, but youโ€™d need to manually wrap any words or phrases with <span></span> and add the respective styling.

Jonathan_Ross
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Add Markdown to at a minimum Long Text field. I mean even your community app has markdown capabilities. Would be awesome.

Jeremy_Oglesby
14 - Jupiter
14 - Jupiter

Their community app is not built by them. Itโ€™s a commonly used forum software called discourse. Just FYI

Jonathan_Ross
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

yea i know - it was just pointing something that is common in apps used as CMS , Tracking, Project Management, Forms, Etc.

We were going to use Discourse - but decided on a different path ourselves.