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Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend. It's hugely underpowered and under-featured. It feels

by dpkrjb 5y ago

Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend. It's hugely underpowered and under-featured. It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.

qwertyzxcvmnbv 5y ago
Export ignores filters on database views! -_-"
lf-non 5y ago
I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.
- wiredfool 5y ago
  I wish. One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web) PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that people want.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    > PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document I completely agree. Having the ability to look at what a dynamic document looked like at a particular moment in time (and be able to archive it), is a very important feature. In a dynamic document like Notion, people will still want to know what the data/doc looked like when decisions are made. Page-based layouts make this much easier.
    - cxr 5y ago
      What you're talking about is a failure in the "addressability" section of the digital media rubric. It's not page-based layouts that make this easy. That's entirely orthogonal. (This new Pageless feature of Google Docs, for example, doesn't make it any better or worse at satisfying the use case you're referring to than it was before.)
      - mbreese 5y ago
        I’m thinking specifically as using PDFs as an archival format to snapshot the state of a document at a moment in time. PDFs are inherently page-based (well, at least in the way they are commonly used in business, I know they could be any dimension, but that’s still a “page”). It isn’t just the ability to have temporal addressability (if I’m using the word the same way as you). I don’t really care if I can time machine back to see how a notion document looked two weeks ago. I need the ability to archive that document, save it outside of notion, send it to my client, etc. You can do this with many different formats, and could also export JSON objects if necessary. However, when it comes to mixing layout and data, PDF is a pretty good format that has good existing tooling. So, it’s not entirely orthogonal… it’s not just about recording state in time. You have to be able to share it in a meaningful format — independent of the original application.
        cxr 5y ago
        All the things you said about PDF are true. You can say other true things, like that it's true that PDF gives these nice archival properties and that at the same time it's true that PDF begins with the letter P. Nevertheless, it doesn't make sense to conclude that what you want from an archive format is for it to begin with the letter P. That PDF simulates physical pages (versus not) is similarly beside the point.
        lIIIllllIIII 5y ago
        Your comment sent me off on a mental tangent for a minute about what it would take to create a PCF - portable canvas format I suddenly realised I was reinventing HTML! Just allow people to export HTML/CSS for archival.
  - lf-non 5y ago
    I never quite understood why PDFs are considered to be fixed baked references. Plenty of software can edit pdfs. I have used affinity designer in past to fix up issues in PDFs received from designers. Seems like this can be better addressed by versioning and audit logs or checksums.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      Culture mostly, turns out that little barrier to editing makes PDF practically immutable for non-secure uses.
    - dmurray 5y ago
      Sure, but the particular PDF I emailed you is immutable (by me). It's sitting in my Sent folder and your Inbox folder in our respective email clients, and we can both be sure what it said. Notion could implement a feature like "permalink to the content as it was at this point in time". Maybe they already have. But for me to be sure that's an immutable record, I at least have to trust Notion. I don't see where checksums come into it - either I trust Notion to tell me I'm getting the same document we agreed on, or I need to be able to download the document in a readable form and compute the hash on my client. In which case we're back at PDF again.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    Could also just be a temporary thing for now. Wasn’t long ago when signing things over the internet wasn’t a thing. People adapt slowly to changing technological advancement. Businesses can take even longer to adapt (requires then to fail + a new generation to bring along new ways with them and supplant the old way).
    - zerkten 5y ago
      Have you been to Japan? Everything involves more paper than Europe in 2000. It doesn't need to be optimized, but it should be possible to achieve things like static PDF or printout.
- coffeefirst 5y ago
  In remote life I started printing anything long and complicated I needed to read just to give my eyes a break from screens all day. Is it becoming niche? Yeah, probably, but we might want to think of it as being niche in the way that accessibility features are niche.
  - Belphemur 5y ago
    That's one of the reason why I'm so happy with my Boox e-ink tablet. Anytime I need to read big documents I just export them and put it on it. Easy for the eyes and easy to take note on the document.
- morgante 5y ago
  I haven't actually printed a document in years, but I export PDFs pretty regularly. When sharing documents with enterprise customers, it's far more reliable to share a PDF than to share a link to a document which is often restricted due to access rules on my side or firewall rules on their side.
- bdlowery 5y ago
  Submitting assignments as pdf’s is extremely common at Universities. It feels like literally everything needs to be a pdf. Also, when sending something to a client, it’s way more professional to send them a pdf document as an attachment they can open right in their browser instead of some obscure google docs / notion link.
makeitdouble 5y ago
You are right. I’ve been in Notion heavy companies almost since its launch, and I’m not sure I ever tried to print a page ever. Sharing has been done in two ways as far as I remember: straight making the page public when it was open information, or using Notion as a common draft and reformatting the text in Docs (+ adding headers etc.) before sending it to the partner. I think instinctively anything “serious”, like a legal contract for instance, goes into Docs, even if Notion or another tool is used as a first step for collaboration.
thfuran 5y ago
I don't recall the past time I tried to print any document. And given that I don't own a printer and haven't been to the office in years, it must've been a while.
jitl 5y ago
> It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend Ah well, I built it in my first week or so as part of a hiring trial process, back when the company was 16 people in a remodeled auto body shop. Before that, the “PDF Export” feature just opened the browser print dialog. One fun thing about working at a startup is that you solve a problem for 90% of your users, but after a while of user growth and demographic shift, that remaining 10% ends up being bigger than the original 90% was in raw numbers.
- alberth 5y ago
  Off topic: any updates on the development Notion communicated 3 years ago about creating Page Level Defaults? https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1103069853252911104 https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1103069853252911104 It sure would be nice if I could make all pages "small text" and "full width".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sergiotapia 5y ago
Haven't printed a document in four years now. I think the number of people who print is getting smaller and smaller.
paxys 5y ago
That's the point though. If you frequently have to convert documents to PDF or print them then you shouldn't be using Notion. Not having to worry about these use cases gives these news apps a huge amount of flexibility to evolve their UX. Otherwise every single document editor will continue to look and work like Word, as they have done for the last 30 years.
- bdlowery 5y ago
  Use cases? I just want exactly what I have in notion… but printed to pdf. How is that taking away from “evolving their UX”.

by dpkrjb 5y ago

qwertyzxcvmnbv 5y ago

Export ignores filters on database views! -_-"

lf-non 5y ago

I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.

wiredfool 5y ago
I wish. One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web) PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that people want.
- mbreese 5y ago
  > PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document I completely agree. Having the ability to look at what a dynamic document looked like at a particular moment in time (and be able to archive it), is a very important feature. In a dynamic document like Notion, people will still want to know what the data/doc looked like when decisions are made. Page-based layouts make this much easier.
  - cxr 5y ago
    What you're talking about is a failure in the "addressability" section of the digital media rubric. It's not page-based layouts that make this easy. That's entirely orthogonal. (This new Pageless feature of Google Docs, for example, doesn't make it any better or worse at satisfying the use case you're referring to than it was before.)
    - mbreese 5y ago
      I’m thinking specifically as using PDFs as an archival format to snapshot the state of a document at a moment in time. PDFs are inherently page-based (well, at least in the way they are commonly used in business, I know they could be any dimension, but that’s still a “page”). It isn’t just the ability to have temporal addressability (if I’m using the word the same way as you). I don’t really care if I can time machine back to see how a notion document looked two weeks ago. I need the ability to archive that document, save it outside of notion, send it to my client, etc. You can do this with many different formats, and could also export JSON objects if necessary. However, when it comes to mixing layout and data, PDF is a pretty good format that has good existing tooling. So, it’s not entirely orthogonal… it’s not just about recording state in time. You have to be able to share it in a meaningful format — independent of the original application.
      - cxr 5y ago
        All the things you said about PDF are true. You can say other true things, like that it's true that PDF gives these nice archival properties and that at the same time it's true that PDF begins with the letter P. Nevertheless, it doesn't make sense to conclude that what you want from an archive format is for it to begin with the letter P. That PDF simulates physical pages (versus not) is similarly beside the point.
      - lIIIllllIIII 5y ago
        Your comment sent me off on a mental tangent for a minute about what it would take to create a PCF - portable canvas format I suddenly realised I was reinventing HTML! Just allow people to export HTML/CSS for archival.
- lf-non 5y ago
  I never quite understood why PDFs are considered to be fixed baked references. Plenty of software can edit pdfs. I have used affinity designer in past to fix up issues in PDFs received from designers. Seems like this can be better addressed by versioning and audit logs or checksums.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Culture mostly, turns out that little barrier to editing makes PDF practically immutable for non-secure uses.
  - dmurray 5y ago
    Sure, but the particular PDF I emailed you is immutable (by me). It's sitting in my Sent folder and your Inbox folder in our respective email clients, and we can both be sure what it said. Notion could implement a feature like "permalink to the content as it was at this point in time". Maybe they already have. But for me to be sure that's an immutable record, I at least have to trust Notion. I don't see where checksums come into it - either I trust Notion to tell me I'm getting the same document we agreed on, or I need to be able to download the document in a readable form and compute the hash on my client. In which case we're back at PDF again.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  Could also just be a temporary thing for now. Wasn’t long ago when signing things over the internet wasn’t a thing. People adapt slowly to changing technological advancement. Businesses can take even longer to adapt (requires then to fail + a new generation to bring along new ways with them and supplant the old way).
  - zerkten 5y ago
    Have you been to Japan? Everything involves more paper than Europe in 2000. It doesn't need to be optimized, but it should be possible to achieve things like static PDF or printout.
coffeefirst 5y ago
In remote life I started printing anything long and complicated I needed to read just to give my eyes a break from screens all day. Is it becoming niche? Yeah, probably, but we might want to think of it as being niche in the way that accessibility features are niche.
- Belphemur 5y ago
  That's one of the reason why I'm so happy with my Boox e-ink tablet. Anytime I need to read big documents I just export them and put it on it. Easy for the eyes and easy to take note on the document.
morgante 5y ago
I haven't actually printed a document in years, but I export PDFs pretty regularly. When sharing documents with enterprise customers, it's far more reliable to share a PDF than to share a link to a document which is often restricted due to access rules on my side or firewall rules on their side.
bdlowery 5y ago
Submitting assignments as pdf’s is extremely common at Universities. It feels like literally everything needs to be a pdf. Also, when sending something to a client, it’s way more professional to send them a pdf document as an attachment they can open right in their browser instead of some obscure google docs / notion link.

makeitdouble 5y ago

You are right. I’ve been in Notion heavy companies almost since its launch, and I’m not sure I ever tried to print a page ever. Sharing has been done in two ways as far as I remember: straight making the page public when it was open information, or using Notion as a common draft and reformatting the text in Docs (+ adding headers etc.) before sending it to the partner. I think instinctively anything “serious”, like a legal contract for instance, goes into Docs, even if Notion or another tool is used as a first step for collaboration.

thfuran 5y ago

I don't recall the past time I tried to print any document. And given that I don't own a printer and haven't been to the office in years, it must've been a while.

jitl 5y ago

> It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend Ah well, I built it in my first week or so as part of a hiring trial process, back when the company was 16 people in a remodeled auto body shop. Before that, the “PDF Export” feature just opened the browser print dialog. One fun thing about working at a startup is that you solve a problem for 90% of your users, but after a while of user growth and demographic shift, that remaining 10% ends up being bigger than the original 90% was in raw numbers.

alberth 5y ago
Off topic: any updates on the development Notion communicated 3 years ago about creating Page Level Defaults? https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1103069853252911104 https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1103069853252911104 It sure would be nice if I could make all pages "small text" and "full width".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sergiotapia 5y ago

Haven't printed a document in four years now. I think the number of people who print is getting smaller and smaller.

paxys 5y ago

That's the point though. If you frequently have to convert documents to PDF or print them then you shouldn't be using Notion. Not having to worry about these use cases gives these news apps a huge amount of flexibility to evolve their UX. Otherwise every single document editor will continue to look and work like Word, as they have done for the last 30 years.

bdlowery 5y ago
Use cases? I just want exactly what I have in notion… but printed to pdf. How is that taking away from “evolving their UX”.