Currently we use Notion as a source of String, design would use them and put them into Sketch. Because of that the text is really a placeholder and we (devs) need to look for designs in Figma and for strings in Notion.
Would it be possible to link strings to external source? Or does Figma offer a way to manage strings?
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Figma cannot automatically pull data from somewhere.
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File editors can manually sync copy with various sources of truth. But Notion is not one of them as it doesn’t have the public API so nobody can build anything with it yet.
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Notion seems like a rather weird choice for the source of truth for strings. I would suggest your team to switch to a professional tool built specifically for that — Ditto: https://www.dittowords.com/. But if not Ditto, at least use something that has more structure to it than Notion, like Google Sheets. You can easily sync them with Figma files via a plugin.
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Thanks for quick response!!!
- Could Figma refer to internal source in Figma where all strings would be stored and they would be used in different screens later on, always in sync?
2/3. I personally hate Notion as source of strings, the choice was made before current dev team was completed (me included). Can you point to some article / post how can Ditto or Google Sheets be synced with Figma?
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The only way would be to use Components for that but this approach is rather clunky. I’d personally prefer syncing with Ditto/Google Sheets.
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I don’t have any specific articles, you may be able to find something on your own. Ditto has a Figma plugin to sync strings, so you can manually update Figma with the latest copy changes. But not only that, you can use Ditto itself as a source of truth in your code (instead of going the route of Ditto → manual sync with Figma → copy/paste to your code). You can pull text from Ditto directly to your code using their API.
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Google Sheets sync is a rather simple and intuitive plugin that can sync strings and even images.
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