[SOLVED] Formatting options for Long Text

[Arlo_Haskell]

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.

[jn08]

That would be my use case as well. Book publishing needs blurbs (or book descriptions) that often contain italics or bold. I’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. It’s a lot more labour intensive than it needs to be, especially given the page designer block. I’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]

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]

+1 for this. Bold, underline and bullets for sure, but I have a number of other uses I’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. I’d like to be able to put an editable table into the long-text field.

[stephan_tran]

+1 for this feature- Submitted such a long time ago…

[Oliver_Perez]

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

[Chris_Lu]

We’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]

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

This isn’t ideal, and possibly of side interest to some, but if anyone’s trying to use AirTable to produce a dynamic webpage/site (e.g. see here), they can use CSS styling to ‘parse’ the carriage returns in a Long Text field and replace them with line breaks.

Just use the css style `white-space: pre-wrap;’. Wrap any AirTable field you’re inserting into a HTML page with a class that has ‘white-space: pre-wrap’ for styling. e.g.

In HTML:

<p class=“w”>
<!–insert the AirTable Long Text here.–>
</p>

In CSS:

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

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

[Jonathan_Ross]

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

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Their community app is not built by them. It’s a commonly used forum software called discourse. Just FYI

[Jonathan_Ross]

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.