We use the standard quote object for quoting and have a custom text field to use for extended line item information. However, this field keeps cutting off the text arbitrarily; in this particular example it is after 195 characters. The field is a rich text area with a 3000 character limit. Can anyone explain why this is happening?
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#CRM Configuration
Hi Lisa,
The short version: this is a limitation of standard quote templates rather than something misconfigured on your end, and the reason it looks arbitrary is that the character count isn't counting what you see.
Rich text area fields store HTML behind the scenes — paragraph tags, line breaks, bold, font styling, all of it. Character limits in quote templates count those hidden formatting characters along with the visible text. So your 195 visible characters plus the markup wrapping them is hitting the renderer's internal ceiling. That's also why the cut-off point moves around between records: content with more formatting truncates sooner, plain content goes further. Your field's 3,000 character limit governs what Salesforce will store, not what the PDF engine will render.
A quick way to confirm it: take the same content, strip all formatting so it's plain unformatted text, paste it back in and regenerate the PDF. If it runs noticeably further before cutting, markup overhead is your culprit.
On what to do about it:
If you can live without formatting, switching to a plain Long Text Area removes the markup overhead entirely and gets you meaningfully more usable characters, with a predictable cut-off instead of a moving one.
If you need the full 3,000 characters per line item, standard quote templates aren't going to get you there. The usual routes are a Visualforce quote PDF template, where you control the rendering, or a document generation tool — S-Docs, Conga, Nintex DocGen and similar all handle long per-line-item text properly. More work up front, but it's the only way to stop fighting the limit.
One thing worth ruling out first: check field-level security on that field for the profile generating the PDF. If a field isn't fully visible to the user, it can render oddly or not at all on template PDFs. Less likely given you're seeing partial text, but cheap to verify.
Hope that helps.
Lisa — also worth saying: if the extended line item info is genuinely long, it may be worth asking whether it belongs on the PDF as a line item column at all, versus a terms or details section further down. Line item columns are narrow by design and long text tends to look cramped even when it does render.
