Launched: Save a Page as PDF

@Matthew_Tebbs, this was a long awaited feature and I understand it is still much behind what could be desired. For us, we usually need pdfs for three types of things: 1) Invoices (not only to print, but Ideally also to email with custom messages). 2) Contracts (we have a very wide range of dynamic data contracts which could be generated here. We populate parts of the contracts from other tables. One reason why we do not do that in Coda but do in Google Sheets - it is the printing capabilities of Google Sheets. They can print, makde pdfs in a very very powerful way. I suggest that you check it out. 3) Operations instructions with dynamic data. These get emailed to relevant people, so email functionality goes alongside well.

For us it is important to have: A4 size documents, Print only selected part of the page, Fit-to-page features.

Thanks a million for pushing this further.

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Awesome works! It does not support Chinese characters at the moment!

Unfortunately I can’t due to confidentiality reasons.

Hi @Charlie_Lin, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’ve just deployed a fix and non-Latin character sets should be working now.

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Any update yet to the problem of images not showing up in the pdf when they are brought in by formulas?

Hi,
I’ve just discovered that instead of using “save as PDF” or printing to PDF, you use Microsoft print to PDF you can get small file sizes specially when you are printing a table with lots of thumbnail pictures.
The difference is huge. A table with 32 pictures, at first had 35MB, which is impractical to send as email attachment. It all came down to 330KB when using the Microsoft virtual printer.
For me, it’s a very useful tip and I wanted to share with the community.

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Hi @Connor_McCormick! We’ve looked into this and are unfortunately running into browser limitations in Chrome where some images inside embeds don’t print. We’ve filed a bug with Chrome here that you can follow:

As a workaround, I believe these images are included if you create a PDF of the page from the … menu next to the doc name.

Does this mean that if I instead use Firefox I should be able to print those pages!? If so that’s really great news

@Connor_McCormick Yep, I’d suggest giving that a shot. Let me know how it goes!

It works! Amazing, thank you. Still cuts off my images in the middle of them, but at least they load. Thank you!

Glad it works! And yes, there are some known issues with how iFrames scale in print. Unfortunately, a lot of this is native browser rendering behavior and there’s not a lot we can reasonably do at this point.

That’s an enormous bummer. Is there anything I can do to manually add a new page?

@Connor_McCormick would love to help out with this if possible / better understand your embed-printing scenario. Would you mind sharing more more about your use-case? Feel free to DM me so we don’t clobber this thread.

Hi @Matthew_Tebbs

Having PDF’s is great. Ideally more controls around what is printed and more importantly a button. So I can create a button to automate; creation of PDF, composition of email and send of email with PDF attached.

All the best,

Ivan

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I agree with this 100%. And we really need a page break character/function, I have some variable length docs and I need to play around with whitespace to get some meaningful page separation.

I have been trying to find a work around, but I can’t find one…

I’m using format() to create a contract, however with Brave or Chrome the pagination / margins cut the text off wonky. Any ideas on how to fix?

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Hey @Matthew_Tebbs ,

what’s the status on this topic, will we be able to export PDFs for every row in a table automatically? :slight_smile:

Hey John,

I’ve had to create a couple contracts too - It is a pain when pieces are cut off. If it is a somewhat consistent contract, could you just put a character(10) before the “Uses of Software” piece so that it defaults to the next page?

Kind of. Since I’m using format() to generate the block of text, I broke it up into separate format() functions for each page. It is very hacky and not a good solution; albeit works.

@BenLee I am trying to produce an email using Automations that preserves the formatting of the charts (timeline and bar chart, in this example). Is there a way that those charts can be rendered correctly via the emailing automation? I post this question here because I assumed there would be a way to automatically generate and attached the Page PDF printout to an email, and by doing so (as is the case today when you make a PDF of a page), I would be able to present the chart as formatted within Coda.

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