New: Print Interfaces pages or save them as a PDF

Very nice.

This is most interesting, thanks for sharing! You've mentioned that;

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@Ayesha_Bose wrote:

What is not supported yet?

• Print for Timeline view in the Data tab
• Print for Grid and Gallery layouts in Interfaces
• More than 100 record details
• Automation support for generating PDFs
• Other export formats, like PNG or CSV

May I ask, are these items on the development roadmap, with a planned release? Is there a beta testing application available for testing and feedback?

When it comes to printing record data, obviously a go-to for many users has been the Page Designer App - and although it has some very specific problems of its own (no multi-page support and non-dynamic linked elements (resulting in text from one element clashing with another ), it does get a few things right - like having a tight output with minimum wasted white-space and the ability to host a company logo.

I have some questions if you're up for answering. 😃

• Are there plans to refine options for interfaces to allow for tighter placement of elements with smaller margins?
• Can we please get dynamic colours in interfaces, so that, an interface regions colour can be influenced by a Single Select fields colour.
• Can we have an image element for the task of hosting a static logo within an interface. 

@Karlstens: thanks for taking a look! In general, we're hoping to get feedback from this new feature to help us prioritize our roadmap in this area for the next few months. We don't yet have a planned release date for any of the areas we don't support yet (and no beta right now).

• On tighter margins, we don't have any explicit plans to address this but I can see how this would be useful for printing record data! I'll pass along to the team.
• Can you tell me more about what regions you want color on? I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "an interface regions".
• We are actively thinking about ways to support adding logos into interfaces and think this is likely something that we'll tackle soon! We haven't kicked this project off yet, so we haven't finalized our approach (using an image element or something else), but this is definitely top of mind.

Hi Ayesha, looks good in principal. It is not yet available in our interface though, whether or not we add a new page. Also, without the ability to specify the page size in the3 designer, it will be very limited in usage.

@Craig11: if you're an enterprise customer, this update will be slowly rolling out over the next couple of weeks (you can reach out to your account manager for more info). Otherwise, you should be able to see the option when you create a new page like a List or Timeline under the "..." menu in the top right.

On page size, we're relying primarily on the browser's settings for page size in the print dialog: 

Once you have access, would love to learn if that setting is sufficient for your use case or if there are other sizes / settings you need!

Hey

This is a great addition as we've been trying to figure out an alternative solution at our company to do exactly this. Just wondering if there's anyway we can take the pdf of the whole record detail without doing this multiple times. Currently it looks like you have to only do sections at a time. Is there possibly something I'm doing wrong or is this how it currently works. Strangely enough I can zoom out to 25% and then use CTRL + P and it actually grabs a lot more pages at normal view size.

This is a great addition to interfaces! We're endorsing this to be prioritized in the future:

• Automation support for generating PDFs 

Actually, automation support for taking e.g. daily screenshots of data in an interface (be it in PDF or any other format) would be highly appreciated!
Great job, Airtable team!  

Hi there! 
It is an amazing function that we have been waiting for a long time! I was about to start with add-on tools, but let's hope this improves

Some observations:
in portrait mode it does not print everything on the screen. For example, in the graph below it should go up to month 12

and now that i see it, just print the first page

But as I said before, we hope this will improve with time and user feedback.

It would be great to get fully editable PDF`s. With recognizable fonts. 

Also as @NikolinaGaraca said before, the possibility of using automations to get pdf of interfaces should be top of the top.

Thanks!

🙂

This is great to see some progress on PDF reporting here. My goal is to print multiple records on a single page, but I'd like to lay out the fields in a page designer/InDesign/WYSWYG style.

My records may have 20+ fields, and there's no way to automatically print these without stacking/grouping similar fields on top of each other. Tight and small fonts, but this type of export to a PDF is an essential daily task in my industry (commercial real estate).

With all the progress with Interface Designer, this is the last thing preventing Airtable from being a killer app for us. Right now we export to Excel and have a clunky system to accommodate. Thanks!

@Ayesha_Bose So happy to see this feature rolled out. I am running across two issues when printing a full set of records to PDF:

1. If any record text or content (like a single select field pill) carries over from one page to the next, it gets cut off. 
2. The full content of a Long Text field is not displayed for some records. Instead, the heading of the next record in the list is displayed.

Both of these issues are present in the screenshot below. If there are workarounds for either/both, please let me know. Otherwise, please make this a priority to address as soon as possible, as I am unable to use this functionality currently. Thanks!

Hi @Gavin_Wright! We have a fix going out later today for some of content cut-off issues you described. And next week we plan to release more improvements to page breaks and content boundaries.

Thanks, and please let us know if you come across any more issues like this.

@Matt_Bush The most recent update has made things worse, unfortunately. Text content and select fields are no longer being cut off, but headings still are. There are also now fields being omitted entirely for some records and page breaks/significant margins between records where the solution for content cutoff between pages has been implemented.

There should be a "Program Details" Long Text field displayed below the Start/End Dates in the screenshot below, but it is not there. The same field from the previous record can be seen cut off at the top of the screenshot, while the heading for the next record is cut off at the page break. 

Hi @Gavin_Wright, we are releasing more improvements to page breaks this week which should address the issue you're describing. Please let us know if these issues persist for you after this week. 

@Katheryn_Zhao The cutoff issues on page breaks have been resolved with the latest update. There is still a significant amount of white space between some fields/records, though. 

Also, the second issue with the inconsistent display of the content in long-text fields still persists - in some instances in my export the full content is there. In others, it is cut off. Is there a limit set on the height for records that will export to PDF? 

Thank you all for your ongoing support and attention to this feature. It will be a gamechanger for us once these kinks are worked out. 

Really excited to hear about this feature! Have been waiting, hoping this would land! Apologies if this is a silly question, but in your post (and the blog announcing this feature)it mentions one of the supported layouts being:

• Record Details
• Individual record detail pages
• Up to 100 record detail pages in one PDF

If I try to create a new interface, the layout options include "Record review" and "Record summary", but not "Record Details". I had assumed that this just meant the panel showing the record details (ie when you click on a record in the list in "Record review") - but neither our existing nor newly created interfaces have the "..." button to choose to print.

Am I misunderstanding something perhaps?

Sam

UPDATE: I now realise that "Record detail" is a newer option that can be enabled within an interface, so apologies. However, I do still have a question if there were plans to extend the PDF/print feature to the Record Review layout, which provides a lot more options with laying out fields?

@Ayesha_Bose I'm interested in seeing this feature extended to the "Record Summary" interface layout.

Hiya!
We love this feature and have so many use cases for it. Currently we are seeing that even using the "x l" row height, that text is being cropped both in the first column, but also in some of the fields. Would be good if this could dynamically print to fit. I have "printed" this pdf at 70% so this would attempt to fit on the page:

How can I export the interface into a PDF merging the PDF attached into the interface?

Hello there, I can't even see the "..." menu in my interface to see the print option, it doesn't show up. Help please!

Also, for our workflow it is absolutely CRITICAL that grid views are printable at minimal and being able to generate formatted PDFs to export in a nicely fully formatted way would be even better. 

Can you PLEASE allow a good looking print of grid view from interface that's not as horrible as the current print view from airtable???

Hate to continue commenting here, but things are getting worse instead of better for this functionality. There are now repeating/overlaid elements from each record. See below:

Are there any updates on a fix? Or are there any recommendations for other settings to follow to get the print output to work? Thanks so much.

@Ayesha_Bose I'm also not seeing the print option in my "..." interface menu in order to attempt to PDF that way. I'm experiencing the same issues with only the immediate section I can see in the visible interface page showing up in a PDF the manual way and no additional pages with the rest of the content. Is the PDF feature only for Enterprise customers or is this for all on the paid plans?

@M_Behar the PDF feature is for all plans. If you aren't seeing the Print option in your "..." menu, then you may be using a page layout or view type that doesn't yet support printing. See Ayesha's original post to see which layouts are supported.

Hey, 

I noticed there isn't support for generating these with automations yet, wondering if maybe there is a way to do it with a script?

Right now I generate google docs with an automation and then convert it to a PDF by adding "/export?format=pdf" to the end of the URL, then use a button script to use the URL to populate an attachment field. Would be nice if I could do this more simply! 

Happy to wait for it to be implemented in automations, just wanted to check if there are any scripting capabilities at this point! 

Seconding the need to print more than just the visible page area! I am trying to use this to see PDF's of Timeline views and it's not capturing nearly all of my data. Would love if this could create a large PDF page with all my records on it. Without this ability for the PDF to be dynamic, I'm better off taking screenshots. Thank you!