Launched: Improvements to PDFs

After launching updates to printing and PDF exports last year, we’ve been hard at work addressing more of your feedback on the PDF experience in Coda. Starting today, we’re rolling out some new capabilities:

  1. When you export a PDF, you can now choose whether to export your entire doc, a single page, or a page and its subpages
  2. You can choose whether to export in portrait or landscape (which might help when exporting pages with wide tables)
  3. You can choose from a variety of paper sizes, including legal and non-US paper sizes

As a reminder, the PDF export options are accessed via the three-dot menu that appears when you hover over your doc title in the upper left corner of your screen.

We’re working on applying similar functionality to printing directly from Coda, but we hope this update allows you to export a range of content as a PDF that you can then print via the PDF viewer/editor of your choosing for the time being.

Please be advised that, as with most exports, exporting larger quantities of pages can take a bit longer to process.

As much as we love working in Coda, we know sometimes you have to take your docs into the “real” world; hopefully these updates to PDFs (and the printing workarounds they support) enable you to do just that!

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Seriously important features. Thank you!

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This is great, thanks for continuing to work on PDFing. Is it in the queue to be able to PDF the detail/modal view directly?

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Hi Dan,

Yes, that’s a feature that would be super useful. It’s in our feature backlog, but no ETA.

-Matthew

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Great, now we need an action to be able to do it through a button!

FYI I still prefer the Print → Print to PDF for setup flexibility. This way I can preview the export and adjust margins/zoom if needed. Server-side PDF rendering on action (button/automation) would be sweet though.

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Love the improvements here! Would love to see the print PDF option as an API call in the future for routine document generation.

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Super big +1 for this request :point_up_2::pray:

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Yup. This was implemented server-side so we could eventually support generation of PDFs from documents/pages via automation formulae.

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Sweeeeet. Really looking forward to that implementation :raised_hands:

Does this have any impact on page breaks? Is it possible to inform Coda where I want a page to be split?

Or I suppose, it could instead detect images | text and not split them in half.

Referring to this issue:

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I suppose they’ll need a page break element like many other proposal tools/PDF generators use

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Great! We love this feature very much. Three things that would make using this even easier for us:

  1. having a default option for the letter size or saving the last used letter size.

  2. exporting the PDF through a formula with a button click.

  3. Giving the doc a specific name when downloading through a formula.

Thank you so much!

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Saving the PDF settings would a nice addition and relatively easy to do. If I find the time I’ll make it so.

2 + 3 is something in our backlog but no ETA.

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We’ll always page break on a Coda page start. There’s no way currently to page break within a Coda page. We do try to keep elements in the page together if related.

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Hey @Matthew_Tebbs ,

We do try to keep elements in the page together if related.
I really think we need a page break character, but if certain sections are kept together if related, what is the magic to define which sections are related?

I am happy about the current improvements, but since I never know the length of my tables at design time, I have to do multiple tries and insert/delete blank lines to keep some of my paragraphs together.

Love to hear more about ‘related sections’

Greetings,
Joost

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Ah, I mis-remembered :(. Sorry. I had thought we did the work to keep headers on the same page as the associated content, but we don’t. Though we should work on that.

We do try to avoid splitting the following elements,

  • Table rows
  • Cards rows in card views
  • Charts

i.e. a new print page will be started if that will prevent those elements from printing across pages.

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This awesome news, PDF is extremely important for me and one of my top request.

Being able to automate it with a button or something would be extremely nice as well.

Thanks a lot, Matthew and team.

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Great thank you, I think long formulas now just don’t show up when converted to PDF.

And it seems that images still get chopped in half if they are inside a formula:

@Matthew_Tebbs, I just want to acknowledge how much work goes into these pdf features. I’ve worked with converting web pages to pdf before and it was not a fun experience.

I have printed a few pages and sub-pages using this new feature. It works great. As @Matthew_Tebbs mentioned in his replies, there is a built in page break for each separate Coda page. Interestingly, if you have emojis in your Coda page titles they do not pull through to the PDF. However, the emojis in the page body text or text inside of a table row do show up nicely. Also, I selected the “Tabloid” paper size for pages that have wide tables. The tabloid size can be folded in half to equal a 8 1/2" x 11" print out. Thank you so for this update. I :orange_heart: Coda!

@Matthew_Tebbs oh, can we haz grey formula outlines removed from the PDF output?

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