Quote Line Item Description vs Product Description

Question

I don't understand the relationship between Product Description and Quote Line Item. They seem to be the same, yet they're not.

I'm trying to create Rich Text description for a Line Item

In a Quote template, even though I select my custom field as the field to show for description, the PDF view show Product Description, not my Line Item custom field

The preview shows the right view, but even when I save that view, the PDF template does not change.

How do I edit the PDF template to show my custom Rich Text Field as the description?

Answer 1

Rich text will not render as Rich Text in a PDF Template. This is a known limitation of the PDF Render Engine. See Visualforce PDF Rendering Considerations and Limitations for more on this.

The PDF rendering service renders the markup and data on your page, but it might not render formatting contained within the contents of rich text area fields added to the page.

A Template uses HTML 4.1 for plain text. Any Rich Text markup will be ignored (or stripped) before being run through the PDF Render Engine. You'd need to convert the Rich Text to HTML in order for it be rendered the same as seen when viewed as Rich Text. I don't know of any string methods that will do this for you.

Answer 2

That being said. I was able to get the desired result by creating a Formula field of the type "Text" and using the Image function. If you combine this with a second field to house a document record ID, you could upload product images/ thumbnails to a a documents folder, set the Image ID Field on the product, have this twin to the Quote or reference it through your formula directly from the product. This overcomes the issue of the Document Generation Engine stripping rich text formatting from the Rich Text field on render