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Tana Publish: Pages

Share information with anyone using Tana Publish: Pages. Pages let you transform your nodes into beautiful pages with minimal effort on your part.

Overview

Pages is the first product we're rolling out for Tana Publish. With pages, you can publish a node as a long-form style, standalone page, and share the URL with anyone.

Basics

  • Any node can be published and shared as a page.
  • Pages can have banners at the top of the page.
  • The publish preview allows you to customize the look-and-feel of individual nodes and fields.
  • In addition to List view, pages also work with Table, Cards and Tabs view.
  • You can update changes to published content in an instant.
  • Thumbnails are auto-generated for places that support link previews (try it out in Slack or Twitter/X for example)

Documentation

Turn on publish settings

On the node you want to publish, first you need to turn on publish settings:

  • Option 1: right-click on the node bullet > Publish
  • Option 2: run the command Cmd/Ctrl+K > Publish

A node with publish settings activated will have a globe dropdown appended to it with the following options:

  • Open preview: opens a preview of the node in the right dock. If it's already open, it will be grey.
  • View on the web: If node has a published URL, this will open the page in your browser.
  • Unpublish: If the node has been published/has an active URL, you have the option here to unpublish it, which will remove the content and the URL from the internet.
  • Remove publish settings: If the node isn't published, you have this option to remove publish settings from the node, returning it to a regular node

Publish a Page

To publish a page:

  • Open the preview and on the top bar, press the green Publish button. A link to the URL is automatically copied to your clipboard.

Updating a Page

When you make changes to the content of the published node, a new button called Publish changes appears on the top left. Press it to make changes live on the published page.

Remove a published Page

To remove a published page from the internet:

  • Option 1: Push button on top left that says Unpublish
  • Option 2: Cmd/Ctrl+K > Unpublish

Adding a banner to a Page

Banners will show up at the top of the page, and will also be the background for the automated thumbnail we generate when this link is posted in places that support thumbnails.

  • To add a banner, open the publish node, and drag an image into the banner area.
  • To remove the banner, go Cmd/Ctrl+K > Clear banner

Formatting options

Through the preview, you have the option to change the formatting of the page and individual items.

Page-wide

  • Pages have two text options: Serif and Sans serif
  • To set this, open the page formatting options by clicking on the TT button on the right side of the top bar, then select the option you want.

Nodes

Formatting of nodes are informed by the outline structure.

If a node has children, it becomes a heading. There are up to 6 levels of headings that can be created by indenting nodes.

A node with children has the following two options:

  • Paragraph: Show node as heading and children as paragraphs.
  • Heading + list: Show node as heading and children as bullet lists.

A node without children has the following two options:

  • Paragraph: Show node as paragraph
  • Quote: Show node as quote

Descriptions to nodes show up as smaller, lighter grey text under the node, as it does in Tana.

Fields

Fields have several formatting options:

  • Label + value: Shows the field name and value in a column each (default).
  • Heading + paragraph: Shows the field name as heading, and field values as paragraphs.
  • Heading + list: Shows the field name as heading, and field values as a bullet list.
  • Quote: Shows the field values as quotes
  • Paragraph: Shows field values as paragraphs.
  • Move to top: Moves the field to the top of the page.

Descriptions to field names do not show up in Publish.

Views

The following views work in Tana Publish:

  • List view: Default setting.
  • Table view: Shows parent node and field names as table headers, and each node becomes a row.
  • Cards view: Shows parent node as heading, and each child node as a card. Field values of child nodes are also shown.
  • Tabs view: Shows parent node as heading, and child nodes as tabs.

Note: All other views are unsupported for now.

Horizontal line

If you type three dashes, they turn into a horizontal line.

Images

  • Images will show up full-width within the content.
  • Text on the image node becomes the caption of the image.
  • Dozens of images should be fine, hundreds of high-res, heavy images will likely not publish.
  • Images are not indexed.

Audio and Video

Publishing audio and video files is currently not supported. Consider embedding videos from YouTube and Vimeo.

Embeds

We support the following links:

  • Youtube
  • Vimeo
  • Figma
  • Spotify (playlists/albums only)

Automatic thumbnails

In places that show link previews, these will be populated by an auto-generated thumbnail based on the title and banner of the page.

Limits

Node limit

There's a limit of 3000 nodes that can be published in one page.

Linking to other published pages

If you want to link to other published pages, use the published URL.

If a published node is part of the content of a published page, it won't appear when published. This functionality was scoped out for now.

Contextual content

Published pages do not show the values of contextual content/columns.

Indexing

As of October 26th, 2023:

  • The pages are not automatically added to Google’s search index.
  • But there is currently nothing stopping Google (and other search engines) from picking up a link to a published page if someone posts a link, say, on X/Twitter or some other public forum.
  • We specifically don’t allow indexing of images.