Canvas limitations?

Hi everyone!

I am fairly new to Coda and I’m having a difficult time printing/exporting my notes from a canvas column. I created a table to organize my meetings which is pictured below.

My detailed notes are in the canvas column and I need to export them to PDF or just being able to print them would work as well. Every time I use the “/print” or “/export” command it prints (or exports) the picture below instead of my individual notes in the canvas column. What am I missing or doing wrong?

1 Like

Hey there!

See my post here - the video below should also break a lot of it down for you!

3 Likes

Hi Scott! Thank you for the quick reply. So I am understanding correctly, I need to create sub documents in order to print my notes in canvas?

Considering I would be printing / exporting my notes daily and that seems like a lot of work just to share them…Would I be better off keeping all of my notes in their own document?

Unfortunately there’s no way at the moment to automate printing or export. Eventually Coda will add an action to run an export of a page or maybe a way to do combined export of multiple pages into a single PDF. But at the moment, you have to navigate to a page and manually do the export or print.

The best you can do is construct a separate page where you’ll have all the info from all the rows combined. There are limitations though: you can only have access to text (lists etc) from your Canvas column but not the views, charts you build there in your notes. But as long as those are simple text or checklists, you can combine those and preserve the content.

Here’s by and large a similar trick but let me know if you need help with your case specifically:

In Coda, a document is a single entity with multiple Pages. So you wouldn’t be creating sub documents, just a single sub-page that allows you to better print what is inside a canvas column.

And Paul is right - my method wouldn’t work for canvas columns if they included embedded tables, etc.

But it will work with rich text! (Aka headings, colors, bold, bullets, etc)

And no - you can’t automate printing but in the same way you can’t automate printing from a Word doc. In either case you still have to click the button to “print”

Also I would like to mention that Coda is a digital first product. It’s primarily structured as a tool to work well on a screen - the fact that you CAN print a Coda page doesn’t mean that Coda has intended or designed their product with printing in mind as a priority. It’s pages, tables, layouts, etc are structured to work well first and foremost on a screen

I’d still say the workaround I provided in the video is best practice. It allows you to grow your doc with an ever-growing list of canvas column notes and an ability to print those without having to manually create new pages over and over on the left hand bar.

Keeps your doc simpler and less chaotic. Clutter free!

Reach out if you need more help!

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.