It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc).
Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons.
My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that's already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.
Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion.
Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion".
I don't think that Microsoft should be worried about Notion. But things are different with Google Docs, which is really threaten by Notion. At the end of the day, most Google docs can be created in Notion without any difference, and I actually doubt Google docs will be able to evolve enough to prevent that.
The strongest advantage of Notion compared to Google docs is not its text editor but it is his list feature. And there are a lot of list porn people. When you have 10% of your workforce being "hardcore list porn people" and 90% of the others being "dont care people". Then it makes sense that the full organization goes closer and closer to Notion
Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend. It's hugely underpowered and under-featured.
It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.
Thanks for your insights, that's really interesting. Also, if you are putting the same amount of attention to detail and focus on pragmatism over beauty that Zoho Mail uses, I think you'll kill it. I'm by no means dogging on Zoho Mail, I think it's good looking. But the reason I love it is that it's loaded with features/settings, and it's done in a way that is intuitive and highly usable.
No connection to Zoho other than being a happy mail customer
A tangential question on Zoho Writer: why isn’t there any information on pricing (or a statement that it’s free)? I looked for pricing links. I even went to the resources page and searched for pricing and found no results. The very first thing I need to know when looking at an online platform is what kind of lock-in exists, how I can safely try it out and how much time I should invest in trying it out. The Writer pages don’t help me in this regard. I’m on mobile using Firefox Focus, if at all this happens to be a browser and/or ad blocker issue.
One piece of UX/design feedback -- the red color on 'START WRITING" triggers an automatic response that I've done something wrong or that a site is trying to warn me about something. I don't think a lighter shade/different color would trigger the same response
I just hope the industry doesn't "move on" from print-focused word processing and start treating it like a second class citizen. Some of us target actual print: Books, technical manuals, posters, pamphlets, brochures, etc. and Docs is still basically decent "poor man's desktop publishing". Trying to layout a document for print when you don't have WYSIWYG page boundaries is a nightmare.
<sigh> I guess I'm old fashioned but I really like being able to print things (even if sometimes not to real paper).
eg. I print / save websites' ToS to PDF all the time. Over the last few years (especially from Chrome) the result looks increasingly garbled, nothing like what's on my screen. God forbid figuring out how to produce them as exhibits for litigation.
Paper-sized, static content also tends to be a convient dimension for reviewing material of substance (eg. think academic papers).
Often during tax season, or when reviewing database models or complex business logic workflows I'll print the spreadsheets / ERM / flowcharts across large 11x17 sheets that get tiled up on the walls or littered across the floor effectively giving me infinite screen space. Humans are built for working spatially like this rather than clicking back and forth endlessly between tabs. (And incidentally, coworkers have been amazed how much more efficient we become being able to crowd around such an exposition together). I'll keep doing that until wall-sized, surround-you-on-four-sides touchscreens become commonplace (or VR ergonomic enough you can't tell you're in it) along with annotation tools that match the intuitiveness of cutouts and sticky tape.
And if I have to read hundreds of pages worth of literature I still prefer to do it on paper and save myself the eyestrain.
Not bashing the new tech, it sounds cool, I just fear it will make rendering to more traditional layouts more difficult.
A "pageless document that lives online" is also known as... a web page.
Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive.
And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks.
Speaking of editing web pages using gdocs, I implemented this approach[1] on a recent project to make an easy-to-use CMS. The server acts as a proxy to get the HTML from google docs and does some cleanup[2]. It's pretty good for simple info pages that don't require any special CSS or layout.
What ? This is not a web page, this is a text editor with no page layout. It has nothing to do with a webpage. You have the implication backward (all web documents are pageless but not all pageless documents are web pages..)
Edit: I also thought your comment was sarcastic, my bad
Yes. Html/css/js is to a first approximation only usable by professionals anyway. It makes no sense to require normal people to employ professionals to simply make web pages.
> If your document contains elements like footnotes, headers and footers, or watermarks, and it is converted to pageless, those elements will not be visible.
Headers and footers are print-oriented, but losing footnotes is not ok. They could have displayed on the side, or highlighted in some way to display on mouse over or click. Whatever, just make them available...
I've used the new pageless style for a while and losing footnotes was a little annoying at first, be we adapted. I don't have a perfect solution to it, there are alternatives you can do (glossary or something at the end, with a bookmark on each item, so you can link directly to it).
If you make heavy use of footnotes, don't use the new feature (as others have said). It's a tradeoff, and I mostly prefer pageless, especially when embedding images that are larger (width wise).
I agree, there's no reason to lose that feature. Just add the footnotes at the bottom of the doc, no matter how long it is and make the number references clickable to toggle between them.
I'd even go as far as say Headers and Footers should be preserved but just included once at the very top and very bottom. Unless you toggle back to page mode and then everything just works. No data loss.
Seems like an easy improvement to make to pageless mode in the short term.
I'm not a huge google fan but I write a ton and I use google docs extensively, and I have to say I'm crying tears of joy seeing this update. Just yesterday I was complaining to a colleague about how a table he put in a google doc was hard to read because a page-break in one of the rows made it look like two rows when it was only one. Ask and you shall receive! Thank you google docs devs!!!
Does anyone know of a gdocs alternative that uses DOM-based rendering? Google recently transitioned from DOM-based rendering to canvas-based rendering, which prevents extensions like BeeLine Reader [1] from working. This has created problems for people with disabilities, who rely on it.
I'm the founder of BeeLine Reader, and we are looking for an alternative platform that we can steer our customers (which include major universities) toward.
it's not web based, but how is the accessibility of open office? in theory it might be possible to compile it to WASM and get it running inside a browser
As someone who has worked with "contenteditable" and the various javascript rich text editors, I find it quite amusing that they have made this change now. One of the hardest things to implement with contenteditable/DOM is wysiwyg page splitting. Now, just after Google abandons contenteditable/DOM for its own text editor/renderer implementation they add support to disable one of the hardest features they had to implement in the old version.
You are right. Implementing line breaks and pagination algorithms that work well with tables and images - is one of the hardest problems in implementing a word processor. Basically, the newer gen folks want to leave the paper layouts behind and as a result the softwares are becoming simpler to architect - could be a good thing!
To be expected: Later they will post some statistic, which supposedly states, that "no one is using the old way anyway" and that it will be removed in the future.
I know that's not what you meant, but I just want to say that I would probably fight to the death against a redesign that would remove the page splits from my toilet paper.
Is there a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get [1]) document editor that is built on a foundation of HTML/CSS, and explicitly surfaces operations that map to CSS features, like flexbox? Changing the base style just means writing CSS rules for the `p` tag! And it could maybe even encourages component / class-based styling? I imagine it could be used for creating things that may get printed out, but will also see a longer life on a web page. You could even have explicit media queries to apply only when printing! [2]
I think of something like creating a good looking resume, which may include light graphic design elements like divider lines, and might not have a strictly linear layout and put some information in a sidebar. Making something look good in Word can be really frustrating, and require jiggering with margins and column layouts. It may fall apart when you try to add a new job. It's almost a joke that if you want a good looking resume, you should use LaTeX, but that's incredibly inaccessible. So many more people know basic HTML and CSS!
I think a lot of website builders (like Webflow [3] ?) expose a lot of underlying HTML/CSS, but I suspect they also support a lot more ad-hoc graphic design elements that can really make the underlying HTML document a total mess.
I tried this the other day. I had a document with some tables that could use extra width, so I switched to landscape mode and reduced the margins. I then adjusted the width of the tables so they looked decent at 10 inches wide.
Later, I turned on pageless mode. Now the tables all had horizontal scroll bars. From TFA I see that I could change the view to medium or wide, which is a personal setting. Thus, if I use pageless mode with wide tables my view may be fine. Everyone else has a miserable experience until they find this setting.
It's utterly bizarre just how much Google docs seems to have dropped the ball.
It really feels like they haven't developed the product in the past 10 years. This is the first significant feature change that I can recall in a very long time other than minor UI tweaks.
or QUIP. I've seen QUIP quickly gain adoption in the F500. QUIP is an easy addition that augments Microsoft's suite, and expands their existing salesforce relationship.
Kudos to salesforce on a great tool, and great enterprise positioning.
I'm in the industry – have been building Outline (https://www.getoutline.com) as a collaborative team knowledge base for the last 5 years. We went digital-first with the page-less style and implemented optional page control by having a "page break" element that you can insert anywhere in the document which honestly works well.
I thought it would be a more functional, but it seems mostly cosmetic. We don't have page boundaries, but actually they are still there. I can't place text or images outside those boundaries. It's nice, but it looks better with the vertical boundaries, and I think it's more accessible from a cognitive POV to have a boundary too.
It's about time. I curse the stupid page breaks every time I use it. The chance of me ever printing a document has been near zero for decades now.
I run into the same thing with Inkscape, where it seems to assume I am drawing on a piece of paper and I have to jump through hoops to not see the stupid page borders.
Great, personally I'd prefer to properly format letters (DIN 5008-B, anyone) without the need for invisible tables. Insert graphics without them looking like the page did not load correctly and have some sort of macro, variable system to make proper use of templates. Also, I'd love to upload my company's fonts or something a simple as proper numbering in lists with lists in them, but that probably just me trying to use their business product as an actual business user.
Docs largely feels like an abandoned product, newer features don't address actual issues people have. They just add nice to haves that I could use if it wasn't so embarrassing to use docs in the first place.
FWIW, the fonts issue isn’t a technical limitation, it’s a legal/licensing one. Font foundries license by the seat, and scenarios like docs where documents can be shared outside an organization and the font travels with it are against the rules. Office online has the same issue for the same reasons.
There are exceptions, where a company has developed a font internally and owns the font directly, but those are far and few between. Even when a company has commissioned a font from a foundry, they’re usually licensing it from the foundry rather than owning it themselves as a work for hire.
(Source: googler, used to work on workspace, and through a random series of events ended up working closely with the google fonts team on this problem)
EDIT: also, you should be able to use apps script to do document generation from templates, that’s a pretty common use case.
The missing feature I find most irritating is the lack of sophisticated paragraph and character style options. Normal text plus a bunch of headings isn't sufficient for the sort of documents I need to write.
It removes the gaps between pages vertically, but it's not an infinte canvas horizontally like OneNote. You also can't place text in arbitrarily-placed text boxes wherever you like.
I've been using Pageless for a few days. It replaces a fixed page width with dynamic horizontal width adapting to window size, with a viewer-defined maximum width by right-clicking the unmarked horizontal ruler. I find this to be a useful feature for the most part, though it's unfortunate that showing the outline makes the room leftover for text narrower.
Having been on a bit if a documentation spree of late, this is extremely relevant and I’m glad to see it. Pages are a constant distraction to composing content. I’m always trying to format and write my ways towards clean page breaks. I’ll get it right across a multi-page doc, then need to add another piece of important info to the first page and cause cascading chaos below. I’ve tried to get better at using page breaks, but they have their own quirks and aren’t really visible nor intuitive in the typical editing flow.
Confluence is among the pageless-natives, but their PDF export looks horrible and there’s no way to fix that as a user. I reach for it when I need to, but I almost always use https://docs.new when I’m ready to start capturing an idea or notes. So I’m happy to see Google Docs offer pageless and their recent additions of slash commands. I’d rather publish more Docs and less Confluence content. Having both at a large company does create a fair measure of bifurcation but neither seems to be able to replace the other.
We try to break this approach with OrgPad (https://orgpad.com/) and propose an alternative way of working with and thinking about information. In OrgPad, you have cells (nodes/ vertexes) and connect them with one or more directed or undirected connections (links/ edges) or can leave them without a connection. This is all done using a mouse and dragging or clicking. 7-year-olds don't have a problem doing that. The cells have optional title and optional content, yes, they can be empty which show just a little square. If the cells have a title, you can hide the content, which is visually suggested by raising the cell so it drops a bit of a shadow. The cells can contain anything, text, images, files even whole websites in iframes. You can add pages inside the cell, useful e.g. when learning vocabulary. If there is only an image in the cell, we analyze it for alpha color and render a bit differently so there is no extra canvas and the image pops out more. We support links on such images too. With this, it is possible to build simple websites actually and OrgPad can mostly replace e.g. Linktree. We will improve this even more in the coming days.
Of course, when you have created an OrgPage, you have split the problem into atomic ideas mostly contained in singular cells or a groups of cells. You can with a few clicks create a presentation by basically setting up a path of views on your graph. There you go, Prezi is also covered sufficiently well.
Then you add our physical animations, just the overall clean design and powerful keyboard shortcuts and you can do pretty much the same work like with Google Docs Pageless, Miro, Padlet just a bit differently and we feel with less hassle.
This just seems like it is solving a fundamentally different problem than Google Docs/Microsoft Word. When I'm using one of those I usually want to express my ideas in a linear fashion. I see the value in your product but I would never consider it to be a replacement for a document editor
I find this an interesting edge case in writing (mostly engineering docs and strategy for work) that maybe 1% of my audience wants to print out or save as a pdf. And it’s hard to go back and restyle a document to print after it’s written.
As a result, I write in page mode as a hedge against the people who like pages since it’s easier to write in page mode than to do the boring reformats after the writing is done.
I really am happy to see the direction Google is taking with enhancing the productivity suite — from the new integrated view in Gmail, to linked embeds in Docs, to Smart Chips, and soon Tasks in Docs.
These are major updates but aren't too intrusive.
Project management is still not really available the same way it is on Asana, ClickUp, and the likes, but it's really making us do more in Google Workspace.
I'm aware this isn't their primary use case, but the biggest feature missing from GDocs that moves me to notion / etc. is the lack of built in support for codeblocks. If they had that I really feel I would move most of my doc-writing here.
The way I've gotten around that is to create a table that's 1 cell, add inner-padding, and format it with consolas & 12pt ft...etc. Total PITA to do each time you want to copy in code.
I was expecting that it will allow writing anywhere on the pageless screen like OneNote does and will have blocks similar to OneNote. It doesn't. It's still restricted by the page size limit. Don't understand how it's an infinite page for screens.
I keep all of my notes in a single Google Doc called “notes”. The top contains an index with bookmarks to different categories eg health, business, etc. It’s so big and bloated and is barely usable. I am optimistic that an “infinite surface to work on” will help make my notes usable again.
I am sure Docs had this years ago (like maybe a decade ago) - and I recall being really annoyed when all these artificial pages appeared in documents I just didn't think of in a paginated way. It's nice to have it back.
(Disclaimer: not a Googler, my opinions are not my own and should be seen as the official position of my employer, this comment is confidential and is meant only to be read where it is posted)
Perhaps footnotes should convert to notes like the ones you have on Google sheets.
Finally. Every time I create a new doc, the first thing I do is make each page seamless, although it still has a line between each page. In some cases page breaks make sense, but definitely the majority web use case is a long running single page.
I excitedly enabled this right away on one of my docs only to see that it breaks columns. They’re stacked vertically with a line saying this should be a new column. Can’t believe it was launched in this state.
lewisjoe|4 years ago
It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc).
Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons.
My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that's already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.
polote|4 years ago
Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion.
Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion".
I don't think that Microsoft should be worried about Notion. But things are different with Google Docs, which is really threaten by Notion. At the end of the day, most Google docs can be created in Notion without any difference, and I actually doubt Google docs will be able to evolve enough to prevent that.
The strongest advantage of Notion compared to Google docs is not its text editor but it is his list feature. And there are a lot of list porn people. When you have 10% of your workforce being "hardcore list porn people" and 90% of the others being "dont care people". Then it makes sense that the full organization goes closer and closer to Notion
EDIT: "porn list" -> "list porn"
dpkrjb|4 years ago
It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.
k__|4 years ago
Seems like it's touted as an innovation, but the only thing I see is that page breaks are gone.
Which isn't bad, I mostly use Google docs for online articles and to maintain a todo list, so things are now a bit cleaner.
But it doesn't seem like a big change...
freedomben|4 years ago
No connection to Zoho other than being a happy mail customer
AnonC|4 years ago
setgree|4 years ago
One piece of UX/design feedback -- the red color on 'START WRITING" triggers an automatic response that I've done something wrong or that a site is trying to warn me about something. I don't think a lighter shade/different color would trigger the same response
ryandrake|4 years ago
matwood|4 years ago
I would love to meet these mythical legal professionals that use anything other than track changes in docx. :D
rkagerer|4 years ago
eg. I print / save websites' ToS to PDF all the time. Over the last few years (especially from Chrome) the result looks increasingly garbled, nothing like what's on my screen. God forbid figuring out how to produce them as exhibits for litigation.
Paper-sized, static content also tends to be a convient dimension for reviewing material of substance (eg. think academic papers).
Often during tax season, or when reviewing database models or complex business logic workflows I'll print the spreadsheets / ERM / flowcharts across large 11x17 sheets that get tiled up on the walls or littered across the floor effectively giving me infinite screen space. Humans are built for working spatially like this rather than clicking back and forth endlessly between tabs. (And incidentally, coworkers have been amazed how much more efficient we become being able to crowd around such an exposition together). I'll keep doing that until wall-sized, surround-you-on-four-sides touchscreens become commonplace (or VR ergonomic enough you can't tell you're in it) along with annotation tools that match the intuitiveness of cutouts and sticky tape.
And if I have to read hundreds of pages worth of literature I still prefer to do it on paper and save myself the eyestrain.
Not bashing the new tech, it sounds cool, I just fear it will make rendering to more traditional layouts more difficult.
mwexler|4 years ago
punnerud|4 years ago
Try to open a Word document with a zip program, all you will see is a lot of folders with XML and blob images.
Latex and Word is XML. Notion is database.
The benefit of database: History, scale better, multiple users, merge text as diff is simpler +++
asojfdowgh|4 years ago
It doesn't really feel that impressive or new age to include a basic and imo required feature from the competitor so very very late!
algo_trader|4 years ago
Is there some sort of consensus on why Google hasnt really made a real effort to compete with MS Office?
agumonkey|4 years ago
It seems the "live recompute everything" ala Brett Victor (and previous) is spreading, do you agree ??
Angostura|4 years ago
cs702|4 years ago
Instead of creating web pages in html, css, and js, people will now create them using familiar "word processing" and "spreadsheet" apps on Google Drive.
And these web pages come with nice fine-grained access controls -- authors can specify who is able to view, comment on, and edit their documents with a few clicks.
Makes perfect sense.
yoz-y|4 years ago
Most people would not set up something like a git repo to track changes and comment on the content for example.
ivansavz|4 years ago
[1] https://github.com/rocdata/rocserver/blob/main/website/views... [2] https://github.com/rocdata/rocserver/blob/main/website/views...
prepend|4 years ago
elcomet|4 years ago
Edit: I also thought your comment was sarcastic, my bad
deanebarker|4 years ago
da39a3ee|4 years ago
rmbyrro|4 years ago
Headers and footers are print-oriented, but losing footnotes is not ok. They could have displayed on the side, or highlighted in some way to display on mouse over or click. Whatever, just make them available...
kyrra|4 years ago
I've used the new pageless style for a while and losing footnotes was a little annoying at first, be we adapted. I don't have a perfect solution to it, there are alternatives you can do (glossary or something at the end, with a bookmark on each item, so you can link directly to it).
If you make heavy use of footnotes, don't use the new feature (as others have said). It's a tradeoff, and I mostly prefer pageless, especially when embedding images that are larger (width wise).
dudus|4 years ago
I'd even go as far as say Headers and Footers should be preserved but just included once at the very top and very bottom. Unless you toggle back to page mode and then everything just works. No data loss.
Seems like an easy improvement to make to pageless mode in the short term.
mpalmer|4 years ago
https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/#:~:text=Sidenotes%3...
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
polote|4 years ago
TAKEMYMONEY|4 years ago
sequoia|4 years ago
patrickwalton|4 years ago
gnicholas|4 years ago
I'm the founder of BeeLine Reader, and we are looking for an alternative platform that we can steer our customers (which include major universities) toward.
1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...
Seirdy|4 years ago
dataangel|4 years ago
dorianmariefr|4 years ago
samwillis|4 years ago
lewisjoe|4 years ago
zelphirkalt|4 years ago
Andrex|4 years ago
Minor note, they actually made that switch 12 years ago.
https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/05/whats-different-about-n...
polote|4 years ago
ithkuil|4 years ago
But I'd love to have an option to keep the "paper" shape, albeit an infinite strip (toilet paper style).
All this white horizontal space distracts me
falcor84|4 years ago
hnra|4 years ago
BrianOnHN|4 years ago
Because of this, docs could already able to be too big to be useful.
"But outlines..." Not helpful since you can't specify to leave out sub-headings. Which means manually editing the outline every update.
That's why I've moved 1000+ pages of docs to Obsidian.md this year. I highly recommend, especially if you might be adhd.
Edit: to anyone interested, this YouTube channel[2] is a great primer on Obsidian.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24190618/collapsing-elem...
[2] https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA/video...
JoBrad|4 years ago
CodeIsTheEnd|4 years ago
I think of something like creating a good looking resume, which may include light graphic design elements like divider lines, and might not have a strictly linear layout and put some information in a sidebar. Making something look good in Word can be really frustrating, and require jiggering with margins and column layouts. It may fall apart when you try to add a new job. It's almost a joke that if you want a good looking resume, you should use LaTeX, but that's incredibly inaccessible. So many more people know basic HTML and CSS!
I think a lot of website builders (like Webflow [3] ?) expose a lot of underlying HTML/CSS, but I suspect they also support a lot more ad-hoc graphic design elements that can really make the underlying HTML document a total mess.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media#prin...
[3]: https://webflow.com/
mgerdts|4 years ago
Later, I turned on pageless mode. Now the tables all had horizontal scroll bars. From TFA I see that I could change the view to medium or wide, which is a personal setting. Thus, if I use pageless mode with wide tables my view may be fine. Everyone else has a miserable experience until they find this setting.
kyrra|4 years ago
adrianomartins|4 years ago
chippiewill|4 years ago
It really feels like they haven't developed the product in the past 10 years. This is the first significant feature change that I can recall in a very long time other than minor UI tweaks.
bushbaba|4 years ago
Kudos to salesforce on a great tool, and great enterprise positioning.
xhrpost|4 years ago
hughrr|4 years ago
tommoor|4 years ago
lopis|4 years ago
robbrown451|4 years ago
I run into the same thing with Inkscape, where it seems to assume I am drawing on a piece of paper and I have to jump through hoops to not see the stupid page borders.
dna_polymerase|4 years ago
Docs largely feels like an abandoned product, newer features don't address actual issues people have. They just add nice to haves that I could use if it wasn't so embarrassing to use docs in the first place.
mattzito|4 years ago
There are exceptions, where a company has developed a font internally and owns the font directly, but those are far and few between. Even when a company has commissioned a font from a foundry, they’re usually licensing it from the foundry rather than owning it themselves as a work for hire.
(Source: googler, used to work on workspace, and through a random series of events ended up working closely with the google fonts team on this problem)
EDIT: also, you should be able to use apps script to do document generation from templates, that’s a pretty common use case.
Veen|4 years ago
ryankrage77|4 years ago
nyanpasu64|4 years ago
reilly3000|4 years ago
Confluence is among the pageless-natives, but their PDF export looks horrible and there’s no way to fix that as a user. I reach for it when I need to, but I almost always use https://docs.new when I’m ready to start capturing an idea or notes. So I’m happy to see Google Docs offer pageless and their recent additions of slash commands. I’d rather publish more Docs and less Confluence content. Having both at a large company does create a fair measure of bifurcation but neither seems to be able to replace the other.
kaliszad|4 years ago
We try to break this approach with OrgPad (https://orgpad.com/) and propose an alternative way of working with and thinking about information. In OrgPad, you have cells (nodes/ vertexes) and connect them with one or more directed or undirected connections (links/ edges) or can leave them without a connection. This is all done using a mouse and dragging or clicking. 7-year-olds don't have a problem doing that. The cells have optional title and optional content, yes, they can be empty which show just a little square. If the cells have a title, you can hide the content, which is visually suggested by raising the cell so it drops a bit of a shadow. The cells can contain anything, text, images, files even whole websites in iframes. You can add pages inside the cell, useful e.g. when learning vocabulary. If there is only an image in the cell, we analyze it for alpha color and render a bit differently so there is no extra canvas and the image pops out more. We support links on such images too. With this, it is possible to build simple websites actually and OrgPad can mostly replace e.g. Linktree. We will improve this even more in the coming days.
Of course, when you have created an OrgPage, you have split the problem into atomic ideas mostly contained in singular cells or a groups of cells. You can with a few clicks create a presentation by basically setting up a path of views on your graph. There you go, Prezi is also covered sufficiently well. Then you add our physical animations, just the overall clean design and powerful keyboard shortcuts and you can do pretty much the same work like with Google Docs Pageless, Miro, Padlet just a bit differently and we feel with less hassle.
chipgap98|4 years ago
prepend|4 years ago
As a result, I write in page mode as a hedge against the people who like pages since it’s easier to write in page mode than to do the boring reformats after the writing is done.
topicseed|4 years ago
These are major updates but aren't too intrusive.
Project management is still not really available the same way it is on Asana, ClickUp, and the likes, but it's really making us do more in Google Workspace.
qnsi|4 years ago
tomasreimers|4 years ago
glmdev|4 years ago
Not quite as good as native support (e.g. doesn't update dynamically), but otherwise it's pretty solid.
bushbaba|4 years ago
wslh|4 years ago
togaen|4 years ago
falcor84|4 years ago
k__|4 years ago
I always use 125% because things are too small otherwise and it always switches back to 100%.
wooptoo|4 years ago
I remember it didn't have page breaks by default and it took them a while to implement that.
rahimnathwani|4 years ago
I created a doc just now with three different pieces of content:
1. Text - stayed within the text margins, as expected
2. Table with lots of columns - used the full window (i.e. ignored text margin)
3. Wide image - stayed to the right of the left margin (i.e. ignored only the right text margin)
So the image only used 60% of the browser width.
smusamashah|4 years ago
pete_nic|4 years ago
gtk40|4 years ago
xnx|4 years ago
tus666|4 years ago
But why is there such a huge left indent of text?
renewiltord|4 years ago
Perhaps footnotes should convert to notes like the ones you have on Google sheets.
734129837261|4 years ago
danielvaughn|4 years ago
llaolleh|4 years ago
aikinai|4 years ago
notagoodidea|4 years ago
kbrannigan|4 years ago
esjeon|4 years ago
Also, it's pretty shocking that people forgot the term "rich-text".
foxbee|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
eternityforest|4 years ago
Pages are human meaningful location references. Stop making this stuff harder!
analogdreams|4 years ago
kaashmonee|4 years ago
dwighttk|4 years ago
chewbacha|4 years ago