Wide tables are silently cut off in exported PDFs

When an item contains a table wider than the printed page, the exported PDF silently loses the columns that overflow the right-hand margin. The customer gets a document that looks complete but isn't, with no warning anywhere.

What happens

We render items to PDF at A4 with 1cm margins. Chromium shrinks over-wide content to fit up to a bounded factor and then simply clips whatever is left. The clipped text is not drawn on the page and is not in the PDF's text layer, so it cannot be found, redacted, searched or recovered.

Real example

A delivery-exception report pasted from Excel into Outlook: 14 columns, roughly 1850px wide. The exported PDF prints as far as "Address 2" plus two characters of the postcode. Category, Issue, Repeat, the free-text Comment and Closed are gone from every row. One cell that reads Admin-Mitcham-039-Customer contacted for delivery instructions not followed on 23/01... prints as Admin-Mitcham-0 and stops.

Why it matters

This is a data-completeness problem on a disclosure product. Items are exported for DSARs and legal disclosure, so handing over a document with content missing is worse than failing loudly — and nothing currently tells anyone it happened. It also produces a confusing second-order effect: a term can be redacted successfully in the interface while no black box ever appears, because the text it matched is not on the page at all.

Suggested direction

• Detect and flag first — cheap, and turns a silent loss into a visible one. At conversion, compare the rendered text against the source and warn on the item when content did not fit.
• Then remedy — render items that overflow in landscape, or scale the page down further for wide content, so the columns actually print.

Raised from support conversation 583, where the missing text was found while investigating a separate export-gate problem (now fixed).