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.
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.
https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1103069853252911104
It sure would be nice if I could make all pages "small text" and "full width".
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.
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.
It doesn't need to be optimized, but it should be possible to achieve things like static PDF or printout.
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.
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.
I suddenly realised I was reinventing HTML!
Just allow people to export HTML/CSS for archival.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.