[HN Gopher] Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
___________________________________________________________________
Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
Author : eddyerburgh
Score : 391 points
Date : 2022-03-04 08:34 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (support.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (support.google.com)
| kaliszad wrote:
| It is still linear/ rigid in a way.
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| lewisjoe wrote:
| I'm in the business of building an online word processor -
| https://www.zoho.com/writer
|
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe Microsoft didn't like the results of the OLE era and
| decided embedding wouldn't work for enough users.
|
| It seems the "live recompute everything" ala Brett Victor (and
| previous) is spreading, do you agree ??
| AnonC wrote:
| 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.
| aeyes wrote:
| Because you have to buy one of their bundles to get this
| product, these are the ones I found:
|
| https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/pricing.html
|
| https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html
|
| https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/
| [deleted]
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Hi, sorry about the confusion. We didn't have a pricing page
| because the app itself is _free_ for individuals (along with
| a bunch of other editors as well for spreadsheets and
| powerpoint presentations). You can sign up with your email
| account right away and start using.
|
| We do have paid plans in case you need to onboard a team and
| want access to a bunch of other apps as well -
| https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/
| StevePerkins wrote:
| It's "free"... but as a SaaS office suite, the documents
| (along with any attached images, etc) are stored in the
| cloud. And if you're not paying for WorkDrive, then the
| storage limits (if any?) are not really documented or clear
| at all.
|
| I recently signed up for Zoho mail hosting, after Google
| announced the sunsetting for their legacy free customers.
| But the mail plans don't come with WorkDrive access. So
| even though I'm a paying customer to get IMAP access, I
| haven't really touched any of the Zoho office suite apps
| yet because I simply don't understand what my caps and
| limitations are.
| mwexler wrote:
| Just a vote for Zoho. It's a really impressive collection of
| integrated business tools. I keep discovering new things every
| time I check it out.
| adamfeldman wrote:
| The breadth of Zoho apps is incredible, the price is
| unbeatable, but the quality is bad enough to make it not
| worth it, as of late 2019.
|
| I implemented the full Zoho suite a couple times at different
| companies, in 2016 and 2018-2019.
|
| What hurt most are the endless papercuts on the core CRM
| tool. Ultimately the pains for my users weren't worth it.
| freedomben wrote:
| Is your criticism limited to the CRM tool? I've had nothing
| but great things to say about Zoho, but I haven't used the
| CRM tool. Are your criticisms for Mail?
| setgree wrote:
| Looks like a nice site!
|
| 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
| polote wrote:
| FYI Zoho it is not only a nice site, they have 12k employees
| (per Linkedin) :)
| matwood wrote:
| > legal professionals
|
| I would love to meet these mythical legal professionals that
| use anything other than track changes in docx. :D
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Don't forget passing around Excel documents. I'm not a
| lawyer, but I've read accounts of this from enough to think
| it's a whole thing and not an isolated phenomenon.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I agree. I have over 50 US patents, and the multitude of
| patent lawyers I have worked with all use docs with change
| tracking enabled.
|
| EDIT: parents -> patents
| linsomniac wrote:
| >I have over 50 US parents
|
| I feel for you, my kids have two US parents and they find
| them to be quite the pain in the ass. :-)
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| :-)
| LordAtlas wrote:
| Not to mention that having any kind of client-related
| document on an online service like Google that's indexing the
| content (at the least) is probably a violation of attorney-
| client privilege.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| I don't think we ever will or even should ditch paper
| formats. It will always have its place in legal or any other
| industry that relies on formal documenting.
|
| My selfish reason: take the most popular paper format - PDF.
| A PDF created thirty years ago, is viewable today and will be
| preserved intact and viewable thirty years from now. I won't
| be able to say the same about a Coda or Notion doc. With all
| that dynamic blocks pulling data from all over the internet,
| I don't even think it's possible.
| jessriedel wrote:
| But you could have made a similar critique of PDF 30 years
| ago: it started as a proprietary format vastly more
| complicated and fragile than plain text documents. Plain
| text documents had existed for decades and would continue
| to exist. Nonetheless, the benefits of the then-new PDF
| format were so great that it was eventually standardized.
| ztravis wrote:
| There is no "Google Docs" format, though - you have no
| idea how Google is representing your data, or if there
| even is any single "blob" that is your file (and even if
| there is one on the server side, AFAIK you can't get it).
| I'm not very familiar with Notion, but it seems like it's
| probably the same way. That means there's no chance of
| "Google Docs" or "Notion" becoming a standardized format.
| At least with a proprietary standalone format you (or the
| community) has a chance at reverse engineering it.
| Angostura wrote:
| Loop is an interesting app, rendered entirely pointless for me
| by the fact that I cannot share it outside of my organisation
| :(
| punnerud wrote:
| Not from document to block, but from XML-based into database-
| based.
|
| 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 +++
| afandian wrote:
| Surely once you've got a block inside a block you're back to
| the XML model again?
| oreilles wrote:
| XML is a document. A relational database is a relational
| database. Both can be used to create a tree structure.
| Notion does it wit a "block" table, each block having a
| parent block id, and a list of child block ids, allowing
| tree traversal in both directions.
| slightwinder wrote:
| XMl is format, not a document. XML can be used to express
| whatever data structure you want. For the user it has
| little meaning whether the backend is using xml, json, a
| sql- or nosql-database. The interface and workflows are
| hiding it all away.
| afandian wrote:
| Once you're into a relational model you can start
| treating your forest of trees as a big graph if you want
| to (though you don't have to). And you can edit nodes
| individually without having to iterate the entire
| document.
|
| But assuming you're trying to maintain the tree structure
| you still have many of the same issues. Each node will
| need to entail the context of its parent, which means
| that you'll need to know things like transitive closures
| in order to know if a parent node affects a child (e.g.
| deletion) or if a child affects a parent (e.g. re-render
| tree). Or if you move a node do you have to re-create
| pointers below it? And tracking history could get
| complicated because it might span both the content of the
| node and the tree structure metadata (e.g. can you undo a
| change where the text was bold and a block was moved
| around). Where do you put transactions?
|
| I'm not saying this is the same as XML, just that you
| can't magically escape all of the downsides. It's a fun
| problem to solve!
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| How is Latex XML?
| arianvanp wrote:
| ismorphic to xml. it's markup. not structured data
| VyperCard wrote:
| TeX is a Turing complete programming language. It's
| nothing but data and calls to subprograms.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Well with GP's logic, a C program is isomorphic to XML
| because it can be parsed and then the parse tree
| serialized as XML.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Pretty sure database is also isomorphic to XML, in that
| sense. I agree that Notion-ish documents are more
| structured than Word-ish, though.
| notriddle wrote:
| A SQL database, with indexing configured correctly,
| allows you to look up a row in O(log(n)).
|
| A bag of XML bytes doesn't give you that. It takes, at
| best, a SAX parser to do an O(n) scan through the whole
| document to find stuff. Most DOM implementations give you
| O(1) indexing by ID, but they require you to parse it
| first, and that's going to take O(n).
| anamax wrote:
| Creating a database is >= O(n).
|
| While creating and editing a database, it is SOP to
| create/maintain and save data structures that provide
| fast access later.
|
| Is there some reason why you couldn't do the same for
| XML?
| notriddle wrote:
| The problem isn't creating the XML file. The problem is
| querying it later, after you've dumped it from RAM to
| disk, you have to load the entire thing off disk back
| into RAM in order to rebuild the DOM.
|
| A database like SQLite allows you to perform structured
| queries at faster-than-O(n) speed straight off the disk.
| polote wrote:
| > My bet is on Google Docs style,
|
| 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"
| asddubs wrote:
| porn list?
| xiaq wrote:
| I think GP's "porn list people" means "people who really
| like lists (as if lists are pornography to them)"; see
| meaning 3 and 4 in
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/porn#English.
|
| I would say the other way around though, i.e. "list porn
| people".
| asciii wrote:
| Not OP, but thanks for clarifying. It's early this Friday
| morning and I was wondering why Notion worked well for
| "porn" lists.
| irrational wrote:
| 1. Pornhub 2. Uh...
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I hope they meant list porn and English isn't their native
| tongue. In the sense of people who get pleasure from making
| lists. Porn list people would imply people who make lists
| of porn which doesn't fit the context.
| ahmed_ds wrote:
| For certain type of softwares, there is no fear of "not
| adopting". Text and document software is one of them. Every
| tool has their own offering and nothing makes them obsolete.
|
| Let's say, text editors. In the last 2-3 years we have been
| told AI driven auto-complete or code companions will
| "disrupt" the entire experience of writing text and code.
| Before that we had the plugin saga of VSCode and Jetbrains
| and what not telling us more features means more convenience.
| Before that we had GUI and cursor based text editors that
| were simple to use. Before that we had VI and emacs.
|
| But is there any kind disruption? Not really. People still
| like what the use and feel comfortable with. They don't need
| to switch environments but they can comfortably add features
| that they think is necessary. For people who are comfortable
| with Vi text editor the process is Vi > VIM > Neovim and not
| Vi > Notepad++ > VSCode > Github Copilot.
| snewman wrote:
| I'm one of the original authors of Writely / Google Docs, and
| worked on relatively heavy-duty word processors in an earlier
| life.
|
| I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other
| details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from
| Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently
| switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences
| are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage certain types of
| formatting from the keyboard), but a big thing for me is that
| Notion makes it a lot easier to manage multiple pages. Both
| the left-hand navigation list, and the ability to nest pages,
| are game changers when you're trying to manage a large
| collection of information.
|
| Also Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to
| analyze why. And it seems like pages load faster, though I'm
| not sure whether this is literally true or just something
| about the experience makes it seem that way. Either way, it
| makes a difference.
|
| As a word processor, Notion is still pretty immature. It's
| not very good at handling cross-block selections, using
| cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a
| dropped bullet, etc. There are a lot of little fit-and-finish
| touches that are table stakes for a mature word processor,
| but don't seem to be a focus for Notion. I'm hoping, but not
| confident, this will improve over time. Docs is better at
| this (ever since they threw away our our original hacky
| contenteditable code and built the entire editing experience
| in JavaScript), but that's not enough to make me switch back
| from Notion, just enough to make me wish Notion would put
| some energy into this.
| wantsanagent wrote:
| > cut/paste to manipulate bullet lists often results in a
| dropped bullet,
|
| I'm not in the business but I did once spend two weeks of
| my life QA'ing just bulleted list copy-paste edge cases for
| a content-editable based WYSIWYG wiki editor and I would
| like that time back thank you very much.
| [deleted]
| tomComb wrote:
| I preferred notion initially, for many of the same reasons
| you outlined, but eventually I just couldn't stand how slow
| notion is. Google Docs is so much faster.
|
| I'm interested to try Google's new tables product when I
| get a chance.
| boringg wrote:
| Second this comment - notion would win for me hands down
| if it wasn't slow. Unfortunately I don't have the capital
| or desire to upgrade to an M1 to fix notion. So maybe
| when I eventually upgrade my system it will be my go to.
| Fingers crossed.
| jeffshek wrote:
| I had a similar feeling a while ago - but revisited
| Notion after a year or so and they've made a lot of speed
| improvements to it!
|
| A couple of months ago, I got a Apple M1 and a lot of
| these electron apps load much snappier. (Slightly
| impractical fix)
| bckr wrote:
| > Notion just feels cleaner; I haven't really tried to
| analyze why.
|
| There are fewer formatting options, but the options given
| are very opinionated. It is also really good at
| responsiveness to screen size.
| dpkrjb wrote:
| 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| I don't recall the past time I tried to print any document.
| And given that I don't own a printer and haven't been to the
| office in years, it must've been a while.
| [deleted]
| jitl wrote:
| > It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend
|
| Ah well, I built it in my first week or so as part of a
| hiring trial process, back when the company was 16 people in
| a remodeled auto body shop. Before that, the "PDF Export"
| feature just opened the browser print dialog.
|
| One fun thing about working at a startup is that you solve a
| problem for 90% of your users, but after a while of user
| growth and demographic shift, that remaining 10% ends up
| being bigger than the original 90% was in raw numbers.
| alberth wrote:
| Off topic: any updates on the development Notion
| communicated 3 years ago about creating Page Level
| Defaults?
|
| https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1103069853252911104
|
| It sure would be nice if I could make all pages "small
| text" and "full width".
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You are right. I've been in Notion heavy companies almost
| since its launch, and I'm not sure I ever tried to print a
| page ever.
|
| Sharing has been done in two ways as far as I remember:
| straight making the page public when it was open information,
| or using Notion as a common draft and reformatting the text
| in Docs (+ adding headers etc.) before sending it to the
| partner.
|
| I think instinctively anything "serious", like a legal
| contract for instance, goes into Docs, even if Notion or
| another tool is used as a first step for collaboration.
| paxys wrote:
| That's the point though. If you frequently have to convert
| documents to PDF or print them then you shouldn't be using
| Notion. Not having to worry about these use cases gives these
| news apps a huge amount of flexibility to evolve their UX.
| Otherwise every single document editor will continue to look
| and work like Word, as they have done for the last 30 years.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Haven't printed a document in four years now. I think the
| number of people who print is getting smaller and smaller.
| qwertyzxcvmnbv wrote:
| Export ignores filters on database views! -_-"
| lf-non wrote:
| I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even
| as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly
| digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't
| put in much effort into it.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I wish.
|
| One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text,
| stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add
| a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a
| "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of
| thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a
| gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to
| the web)
|
| PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a
| document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that
| people want.
| lf-non wrote:
| I never quite understood why PDFs are considered to be
| fixed baked references.
|
| Plenty of software can edit pdfs. I have used affinity
| designer in past to fix up issues in PDFs received from
| designers.
|
| Seems like this can be better addressed by versioning and
| audit logs or checksums.
| Spivak wrote:
| Culture mostly, turns out that little barrier to editing
| makes PDF practically immutable for non-secure uses.
| dmurray wrote:
| Sure, but the particular PDF I emailed you is immutable
| (by me). It's sitting in my Sent folder and your Inbox
| folder in our respective email clients, and we can both
| be sure what it said.
|
| Notion could implement a feature like "permalink to the
| content as it was at this point in time". Maybe they
| already have. But for me to be sure that's an immutable
| record, I at least have to trust Notion.
|
| I don't see where checksums come into it - either I trust
| Notion to tell me I'm getting the same document we agreed
| on, or I need to be able to download the document in a
| readable form and compute the hash on my client. In which
| case we're back at PDF again.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Could also just be a temporary thing for now. Wasn't long
| ago when signing things over the internet wasn't a thing.
| People adapt slowly to changing technological
| advancement. Businesses can take even longer to adapt
| (requires then to fail + a new generation to bring along
| new ways with them and supplant the old way).
| zerkten wrote:
| Have you been to Japan? Everything involves more paper
| than Europe in 2000.
|
| It doesn't need to be optimized, but it should be
| possible to achieve things like static PDF or printout.
| mbreese wrote:
| _> PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference
| of a document_
|
| I completely agree. Having the ability to look at what a
| dynamic document looked like at a particular moment in
| time (and be able to archive it), is a very important
| feature. In a dynamic document like Notion, people will
| still want to know what the data/doc looked like when
| decisions are made. Page-based layouts make this much
| easier.
| cxr wrote:
| What you're talking about is a failure in the
| "addressability" section of the digital media rubric.
| It's not page-based layouts that make this easy. That's
| entirely orthogonal. (This new Pageless feature of Google
| Docs, for example, doesn't make it any better or worse at
| satisfying the use case you're referring to than it was
| before.)
| mbreese wrote:
| I'm thinking specifically as using PDFs as an archival
| format to snapshot the state of a document at a moment in
| time. PDFs are inherently page-based (well, at least in
| the way they are commonly used in business, I know they
| could be any dimension, but that's still a "page").
|
| It isn't just the ability to have temporal addressability
| (if I'm using the word the same way as you). I don't
| really care if I can time machine back to see how a
| notion document looked two weeks ago. I need the ability
| to archive that document, save it outside of notion, send
| it to my client, etc. You can do this with many different
| formats, and could also export JSON objects if necessary.
|
| However, when it comes to mixing layout and data, PDF is
| a pretty good format that has good existing tooling.
|
| So, it's not entirely orthogonal... it's not just about
| recording state in time. You have to be able to share it
| in a meaningful format -- independent of the original
| application.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| In remote life I started printing anything long and
| complicated I needed to read just to give my eyes a break
| from screens all day.
|
| Is it becoming niche? Yeah, probably, but we might want to
| think of it as being niche in the way that accessibility
| features are niche.
| Belphemur wrote:
| That's one of the reason why I'm so happy with my Boox
| e-ink tablet.
|
| Anytime I need to read big documents I just export them
| and put it on it. Easy for the eyes and easy to take note
| on the document.
| morgante wrote:
| I haven't actually _printed_ a document in years, but I
| export PDFs pretty regularly. When sharing documents with
| enterprise customers, it 's far more reliable to share a
| PDF than to share a link to a document which is often
| restricted due to access rules on my side or firewall rules
| on their side.
| algo_trader wrote:
| Good luck with the whole zoho suite. We could all use some
| alternatives.
|
| Is there some sort of consensus on why Google hasnt really made
| a real effort to compete with MS Office?
| k__ wrote:
| What's the benefit here?
|
| 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...
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Our org does a lot through google docs. Every single doc I
| created I had to fight the stupid page breaks. Like, I was
| never gonna print the thing so knock it off, google!
|
| So yeah, I welcome this change big time.
| k__ wrote:
| I didn't like the page breaks either, but I never had big
| issues with them.
| polote wrote:
| It looks prettier, it allows you to put blocks bigger than
| the content. For example you can have the content to be fixed
| sized 800px and then inside the content put a large table or
| an image that is full width, and it can also feel like a
| static website. That what Notion does, you can "publish your
| page to the web" that gives a public URL that anyone can
| visit, without feeling like they are inside Notion
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| When creating docs only meant to be consumed online, the page
| breaks have gotten in my way before many times. Splitting up
| paragraphs because they don't fit on a page etc.
|
| So I can see this change having a big effect on consumers. If
| by "how big a change" you meant "would anyone even care", I
| think people will care, yes. Including me.
|
| How big a change was it to implement? I don't know.
|
| Note in addition to not having page breaks, it appears to
| have several "responsive" features added too (from the OP
| description, I haven't played with it yet myself). Lines wrap
| at whatever your screen size is (including zoom level), and
| there is apparently some screen-size-responsiveness to at
| least some images too.
|
| I couldn't say how difficult this was to implement, having no
| idea what the code is like, and knowing that large legacy
| codebases can make naive predictions of how difficult a given
| change might be unreliable.
| k__ wrote:
| I didn't think about the costs of implementing it, but that
| it seems to be an discussion worthy topic here on HN.
|
| But I don't understand why.
| JoBrad wrote:
| Right? Isn't this just the Web Layout view that MS Word has
| had forever?
| hadlock wrote:
| The last time I printed something written on google docs was
| probably 2012 or so, a printed copy of my resume
|
| Limiting my docs to a IRL format doesn't make much sense to
| me, page breaks make no sense, with H1/H2/H3 etc you can just
| navigate the doc that way, and internal links work etc. No
| need to say "check out the flurple widget subsection on page
| 92" you just slack/email them the link to the subheader or H3
| or whatever and bam they're there reading what you need them
| to look at, similar to markdown docs on github, but with all
| the manual formating GUI'd away.
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| Google Docs remembers this pageless layout across all of my
| documents. Would be cool if it did so with the zoom.
|
| I always use 125% because things are too small otherwise and it
| always switches back to 100%.
| mgerdts wrote:
| 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.
| kyrra wrote:
| Pageless mode is a global setting on that document that the
| editor of the document sets, and it applies to all viewers of
| the document.
| mgerdts wrote:
| Pageless mode is indeed a global setting. I turn on pageless
| mode on my document with wide tables and everyone sees
| scrollbars with the wide tables.
|
| I use "view > text width" to change the text width to medium
| or wide. This is a personal setting. It looks better for me
| but is still miserable for everyone else.
|
| Suppose I forget that I changed "view > text width" and some
| time later I go about creating more documents that require
| this setting. Now, I'm unintentionally creating content that
| is difficult for all others to read with no idea of the
| misery I'm spreading until someone complains.
| topicseed wrote:
| 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.
| 734129837261 wrote:
| Finally. I had a custom CSS plugin setup to do exactly this. Took
| me 3 minutes to figure out.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Maybe we should just stop with this pageless nonsense!
|
| Pages are human meaningful location references. Stop making this
| stuff harder!
| wooptoo wrote:
| Isn't this how Google Docs worked back in the day?
|
| I remember it didn't have page breaks by default and it took them
| a while to implement that.
| qnsi wrote:
| Great job google docs team! The amount of innovation comming from
| this team is extreme! No competition in Sillicon Valley and
| worldwide
| xnx wrote:
| Glad to see this feature return after being removed years ago
| after Writely was absorbed into Google.
| cs702 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Makes perfect sense.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/rocdata/rocserver/blob/main/website/views...
| [2]
| https://github.com/rocdata/rocserver/blob/main/website/views...
| da39a3ee wrote:
| 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.
| deanebarker wrote:
| This is exactly what I was thinking. I read that page, and at
| the end, I thought "...so HTML then?"
| raldi wrote:
| How do three nontechnical writers collaborate on an HTML
| document?
| wongarsu wrote:
| In the real world typically with Wordpress if the target
| group is outside the company or Confluence if the target
| group is inside the company.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| I prefer the process of writing up a short document
| describing a feature proposal or small project using
| Google docs over confluence. Its self contained, limited
| (focused) in scope and the
| highlighting/commenting/editing feedback loop between
| multiple authors is way better.
| elcomet wrote:
| 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
| prepend wrote:
| This is Frontpage for 2022.
| yoz-y wrote:
| That is a weird criticism. A document is clearly not a webpage,
| main use of Google docs is easy collaboration and that's not
| really a thing with html.
|
| Most people would not set up something like a git repo to track
| changes and comment on the content for example.
| cs702 wrote:
| My comment was _not_ meant as criticism. I 'm not sure why
| anyone would interpret it as such.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I understood it as intended, but I can see how people would
| read it that way. It has roughly the structure of a "it's
| just x with y baggage" comment at the outset and could trip
| that wire in the mind of someone who doesn't finish reading
| before commenting.
|
| edit: more comments appeared while I was drafting. I guess
| it never hurts to have the same feedback framed different
| ways...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It came off as sarcastic initially to me, but I read it
| again and realized it was earnest.
| phreack wrote:
| The way you laid out the beats of your original comment
| made it sound sarcastic if you read it expecting the usual
| off-hand snark that's prevalent on the internet, so "makes
| perfect sense" would turn into "makes no sense at all" -
| therefore seeming like the product is useless or a step
| back when web pages already exist.
| cs702 wrote:
| Thank you. Your feedback is helpful: In hindsight, I can
| now see my comment could be misinterpreted as sarcastic,
| even if that wasn't my intention. (If anything, I think
| giving people more/better tools for creating online
| content is great -- with the obvious caveat that all this
| content will reside in "private webs of documents"
| controlled by a single company.)
| yoz-y wrote:
| Apologies for mistaking it as such. After re-reading it
| again I can see your original intent. I need to brush up on
| my principle of charity :/
| cs702 wrote:
| Thank you. I appreciate it :-)
|
| It seems we've all come across so much (unhelpful)
| sarcasm on the web that whenever we see certain phrases
| or grammatical constructs, we are unconsciously
| preconditioned to think the intent is negative -- even
| when it isn't.
|
| On my end, I'll try to be more mindful about my phrasing
| next time.
| raldi wrote:
| Your opening sentence came off to me as sarcastic opining
| that this is an inferior reinvention of a 30-year-old
| wheel.
| cs702 wrote:
| Thank you. That's what phreack said too. See my response
| to him here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30555760
| ithkuil wrote:
| I like to be able to ditch the page splits.
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| But think of how much less paper you'd throw away in
| switching to one of those endless towel rolls.
| 3np wrote:
| I'm not so certain you'd be saving. Unless you get a TP
| holder with sharp metal teeth and consistently use it to
| get straight cuts to avoid wasting a good part of each roll
| on those angle tears.
| thfuran wrote:
| Cuts? No: https://www.domesticuniform.com/product/smoked-
| continuous-ro...
| 3np wrote:
| ...I'll stick to my Japanese washlet, I think.
| hnra wrote:
| Is "View > Print layout" what you're looking for? It replaces
| page splits (header/footer whitspace and page margins) with a
| dashed line.
| tejohnso wrote:
| The dashed line is distracting and confuses when you are
| using dashed lines deliberately elsewhere. Why can't we just
| have an infinitely long canvas of a specific width? That's
| what I was expecting when I heard of pageless. Was
| disappointed. I'm not sure why I'd want to be able to set a
| minimal text width and then be left with infinite margin.
| ithkuil wrote:
| yeah I use it and it works quite well but then people use
| footnotes and they look weird there; disallow footnotes and
| make that dotted grey line go away and I'm sold
| ithkuil wrote:
| also: the view is a user-setting. When I author some text I
| still need to think about how does it look when there is a
| page split (e.g. tables, figures etc) in case some of my
| colleagues may end up reading it in the "print layout mode.
| kevincox wrote:
| This kinda works but it very half assed.
|
| - It breaks tables that cross pages in weird and confusing
| ways.
|
| - It messes up spacing that crosses pages.
|
| - It interacts poorly with footnotes.
|
| - In results in weird gaps when images need to get pushed to
| the next page.
|
| It is what I used before, but it is clearly a quick hack
| rather than a proper solution of actually not having pages.
| notagoodidea wrote:
| Ok nice, can we have a sane way to add a caption to a table or a
| figure now?
| tus666 wrote:
| 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.
|
| But why is there such a huge left indent of text?
| foxbee wrote:
| I keep trying to write markdown. I can't get use to this!
| dwighttk wrote:
| OpenDoc?
| robbrown451 wrote:
| 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.
| sequoia wrote:
| 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!!!
| patrickwalton wrote:
| Except, the article says tables aren't supported, right?
| Hates_ wrote:
| Not from what I can see. Seems only features that are reliant
| on there being a "page":
|
| Some features are not available on pageless docs: columns,
| page numbers, headers and footers, page breaks, etc
| wslh wrote:
| Seems like they are looking closely at brainstorm tools more than
| typical document writing. Things such as https://www.mural.co/
| and OneNote?
| danielvaughn wrote:
| 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.
| llaolleh wrote:
| This is the most innovative feature Google Docs pushed out in the
| past 5 years lol.
| chewbacha wrote:
| Neat
| CodeIsTheEnd wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
|
| [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/CSS/@media#prin...
|
| [3]: https://webflow.com/
| kbrannigan wrote:
| Hello Ms wordpad
| esjeon wrote:
| Exactly. RTF has been around for ages.
|
| Also, it's pretty shocking that people forgot the term "rich-
| text".
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| "In this setting, there are no page breaks, images adjust to your
| screen size"
|
| 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.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| But content still can't be collapsed/folded below headers [1].
|
| 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 wrote:
| I'm guessing you can't have a very wide section of the doc,
| either. Which is honestly a good thing, in my opinion.
| dudus wrote:
| You can cheat and create a very wide 1 cell table with a 0pt
| border and put your wide content in there.
| lopis wrote:
| 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.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| 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.
| Veen wrote:
| 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.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| My #1 complaint about Google Docs formatting is the lack of
| inline/block semantic code styles, and my primary complaint
| about Markdown is having to spam backslashes to escape
| variable names and math expressions outside of code blocks (I
| also wish it had multicolored highlighting like Google Docs,
| but that's just my idiosyncratic way of taking notes on code
| and color-coding values by type/origin).
| mattzito wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| togaen wrote:
| Google just reinvented HTML documents. Great.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I for one kinda liked MS FrontPage.
| mxuribe wrote:
| google: You see, consumers can now scroll left/right as well
| as up/down, and content is more flexibly viewed.
|
| observer: You mean...like a web page?
|
| google: no, no...its like...its like...well, its...Um,
| content that can be authored by non-techies which consumers
| can view online with lots more flexibility and freedom...Hey,
| these consumers can increase/decrease font sizes, etc. Cool,
| right?
|
| observer: So...Um, its like MS Frontpage?
|
| google: No, no, its more sophisticated than that. Um, maybe
| we're not explaining it right. Its more complex than what
| somrything like Frontpage can make...or well, actually its
| just easier for content creators to use...i guess.
|
| observer: Oh, so its like Dreamweaver circa-early-2000s??
|
| google: Yes, exactly! Oh wait...crap.
|
| /s ;-)
| samwillis wrote:
| 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.
| Andrex wrote:
| > Now, just after Google abandons contenteditable/DOM for its
| own text editor/renderer implementation
|
| Minor note, they actually made that switch 12 years ago.
|
| https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/05/whats-different-about-n...
| polote wrote:
| I dont think hardest things to implement is something Google
| cares of. They dont have any resources constraint
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| 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!
| adrianomartins wrote:
| Welcome to 2022, Google Docs. Unfortunately there's still a long
| way to Notion or Dropbox Paper.
| bushbaba wrote:
| 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.
| xhrpost wrote:
| I've been ignoring Dropbox Paper at my company but will now try
| using it on my next doc. What major features would you say
| Paper has that GDocs lacks?
| chippiewill wrote:
| 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.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I find it incredible that Docs is still unable to number
| headings. And they're trying to sell it to large
| organizations...
| rwmj wrote:
| Also no line numbering! I can't believe they have any
| lawyers as customers since line numbers are essential for
| them.
| theptip wrote:
| Agreed. It's really weird; because of the bundling advantage,
| they don't have to be better than Notion, they just need to
| be good enough that the convenience factor wins out.
|
| It's also frustrating because if Google played to their
| strengths, Docs could be best-in-class; the real problem that
| everybody is struggling with is internal knowledge
| management. Why can't Google build me a privately indexed
| knowledge graph of my internal docs, then let me use Google's
| search to answer questions? It's insane that this is not
| their product strategy for Docs. This should be "easy" to
| wire up, they have all of the tech already for google.com
| search.
|
| People like notion because it is easier to structure nested
| Wiki docs quickly, but you still have the same problems
| eventually of needing to curate your knowledge base, and
| things becoming too hard to find past a certain scale.
|
| Instead we get Data Loss Prevention and a bunch of other box-
| ticking features which, sure, are how you close enterprise
| deals to displace Microsoft. But I think they are sleeping on
| their vulnerability to disruption plays from the bottom of
| the market, and they need to invest more in building a moat
| here. Make the free/SMB customers delighted, and you starve
| potential competitors of the oxygen they need to grow into a
| competitor at the enterprise level.
| catmanjan wrote:
| I'm not convinced Googles smart knowledge engine would work
| in that environment, it probably relies on lots of people
| doing lots of searches and clicking links etc
|
| Compared to only the searches being done by a single
| business and no links in documents
| Lealen wrote:
| It's probably not available because someone decided that it
| should be only available for enterprise customers, take a
| look: https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/
| polote wrote:
| > Why can't Google build me a privately indexed knowledge
| graph of my internal docs
|
| Not easy to do [1]. But that's what we try to to at
| Dokkument [2]
|
| And also knowledge is spread around different tools,
| Github, monday, JIRA, Confluence, Slack. It is not all on
| Google Docs. And is Google is not the most integrated
| product
|
| > People like notion because it is easier to structure
| nested Wiki docs quickly
|
| I don't feel like it is the case. You can't retrieve
| anything unless you know the title of the document or you
| have saves the URL. Most people don't prefer Notion and
| some do, because they are list-addicted people, and it is
| easier to list documents in Notions than in Google Sheet.
| Notion doesn't fix any knowledge management problems
| compared to using Google Drive. And Confluence still makes
| circles around Notion in that area
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895
|
| [2] https://dokkument.com
| user-the-name wrote:
| samwillis wrote:
| 81% of Googles revenue is from advertising, only 7.5% is from
| Cloud Services (Google Workplaces and Google Cloud Platform)
| I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that
| cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces.
| So it wouldn't surprise me if its as little as 1-2% of
| revenue (it could easily be less than 1%). There is no
| surprise then that it is such a low priority for them. It's
| mostly a box ticking exercise to ensure that they can sell
| more stuff to enterprises and hold Microsoft back a little.
| adrianomartins wrote:
| I totally understand this vision, google docs, google
| sites, google drive must be really down in Google's
| priority list. Heck, Google Meet was down there up until
| two years ago.
|
| The problem I think is that, little by little, users start
| stepping outside the Google bubble and they start to
| realize that there's clear benefits. I used to be a 100%
| google person, then we started using dropbox paper for
| documents, notion for company wiki (and personal notes
| too), tandem for video calls.
|
| In 2022, our company is using Google only for email,
| calendar, and sheets. Two years ago we'd be crazy to even
| think about that. We're up to the point were it wouldn't
| seem crazy to go with the Microsoft suite, to be honest.
| samwillis wrote:
| > We're up to the point were it wouldn't seem crazy to go
| with the Microsoft suite, to be honest.
|
| I think for a lot of companies not going with Office is
| crazy, Google docs isn't good enough, and who's wants to
| have 7-10 different suppliers for different products
| (email, calendar, sheets, docs, presentations, wiki,
| chat, video). Far easer to just buy one cohesive system.
|
| There is probably an opportunity for one of the larger
| players to acquire the others and move back towards a
| cohesive platform. There would be push back but I suspect
| it would pay off. Imagine Airtable, Notion and Slack
| under one operation.
| bushbaba wrote:
| >I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of
| that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not
| Workplaces.
|
| I'm not sure I'd make that assumtion. Google workplaces
| makes a lot of revenue. $20/user/month * 100k users in a
| large company is 24MM/year. I'm sure GCP will grow faster,
| but Google workplaces has had more market penetration for
| longer.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I'd bet that if a company has 100k employees, it's not
| paying $20/user/month.
| luibelgo wrote:
| 2021 revenue was $257 billion, 1% revenue is a lot of money
| still
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| It is just the bare minimum, that most people using a word
| processor, can understand. They probably made it to grab some
| market share and then stoppen right there. It is nowhere
| close to being a workhorse to build upon for anyone, who has
| any professionalism in their workings with WYSIWYG word
| processors. Professional documents do not make use of direct
| formatting. One does not simply click a "bigger font size"
| button thrice or the "bold" button or whatever. Google Docs
| is a toy and I wont consider any document created in it in
| any way professional.
| jfoster wrote:
| Considering the fates of other Google products, that's a
| great outcome. At least it didn't end up like Gchat or Google
| Reader.
| slig wrote:
| I think it's great as this gives new companies the
| opportunity to eat their lunch.
| Already__Taken wrote:
| I'm heavy into Google and hard a lot of gsuite education
| deployed. I was always agasp at how Google just doesn't
| improve gdocs/sheets sometimes at all for years. why do the
| two programs have different table/cell markup up and even
| options...
| Andrex wrote:
| The table limitations in Docs are really the biggest thing
| that grind my gears about the service.
| pradn wrote:
| A feeling of progress is hard to convey to users if the
| iceberg is mostly invisible. I assume much of the work on
| Google Docs is harder to see like backend
| improvements/scalability, rendering compatibility across
| platforms, file-format compatibility with MS Word (both being
| able to read/write with high fidelity and supporting the
| useful features).
|
| But if we look at release notes for the past year, we see a
| sequence of smaller features.[1] These include ML-driven
| quick replies for comments, being easily add smart links to
| people/docs/lists, being able to add image watermarks, and
| Japanese grammar suggestions. These announcements are in
| small blog posts [2], and are usually covered by the tech
| media [3] (largely summaries with a bit of flavor or -
| cheekily - instructions on how to turn features off). It is
| hard to feel like there's major progress in Google Docs when
| features, even useful ones, trickle out like this. Perhaps
| the big release every year model isn't that bad, for
| communication purposes. It's just not in the DNA of Google or
| any online service, however.
|
| If you look at the roadmap for Google Workspace, it's very
| much about collaboration.[4] This plays to the brand and
| strength of the online-first vision of Google Apps - it's
| easy to jump in and collaborate on docs, the suite works well
| together. I think companies that choose Google Workspace do
| so to transform the way they work. It's not really about just
| replicating the Microsoft experience on the web.
|
| That said, I think Microsoft has done an amazing job pulling
| their apps to the web and adding collaboration/sync. Their
| online version of Word has basically no caveats, and their
| realtime editing is even better than Google Docs in some edge
| cases. So its unclear which way the market will go. Perhaps
| Microsoft has effectively fended off the online-first threat
| and can use its inertia and muscle to keep Office at the top.
| In any case, we'll move to a more heterogenous world where
| many suites or even individual tools are viable businesses.
|
| [1]: https://support.google.com/a/table/7314896?hl=en
|
| [2]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/10/easily-
| add-t...
|
| [3]: https://9to5google.com/2021/10/20/google-docs-menu/
|
| [4]: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/the-
| future-...
|
| Disclaimer: I work at Google and used to work in the division
| that develops Google Docs. These are all my opinions.
| hughrr wrote:
| Yeah even Pages is better.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| 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.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| 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.
| aikinai wrote:
| 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.
| tomasreimers wrote:
| 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.
| bushbaba wrote:
| 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.
| glmdev wrote:
| I use an add-on called Codeblocks. It lets you select a block
| of text and will format it as monospace w/ syntax highlighting
| in various themes.
|
| Not quite as good as native support (e.g. doesn't update
| dynamically), but otherwise it's pretty solid.
| kaashmonee wrote:
| when the teacher says 6 pages double spaced
| tommoor wrote:
| 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.
| analogdreams wrote:
| so.... a mural clone? currently sitting through a 2 day training
| class that is using mural and i do not get the obsession/love of
| this tool at all.
| prepend wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pete_nic wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| (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.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| > _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...
| polote wrote:
| Then don't use the pageless feature and you will not have any
| issue
| rmbyrro wrote:
| If footnotes are essential, I really won't use.
|
| But I don't think this should stop us from discussing a way
| to possibly improving a product.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Pageless is great, except for the loss of footnotes. Why not
| fix that and have the best of both worlds?
| kyrra wrote:
| (Googler, opinions are my own)
|
| 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).
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Maybe the team behind pageless sees footnotes from a print-
| oriented perspective.
|
| I would look at them as sort of a content enrichment. Like a
| _comment_ applied to the text.
|
| Pageless has comments. Why would it be so bad to place
| footnotes alongside with comments? Or perhaps on the left
| side, below the headings index?
| jer0me wrote:
| Just spitballing, doesn't seem like you're on the team, but a
| possible solution could be a little popup when you hover over
| a footnote like Wikipedia has. Or maybe an option to put all
| the footnotes at the bottom of the document, except when
| printing.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| How would hovering work for a non-mouse user?
| jer0me wrote:
| Tapping, or perhaps it would appear when the cursor is
| next to the footnote?
| getcrunk wrote:
| +1 for tap/click, even for mouse user
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| Why not replace them with linked citations a la Wikipedia?
| dudus wrote:
| 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.
| lrem wrote:
| Have you ever heard the term "analysis paralysis"?
| gtk40 wrote:
| Isn't this the same as "Normal" or "Web" view that has been in MS
| Word for ages?
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-
| reader/ifj...
| dataangel wrote:
| 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
| dorianmariefr wrote:
| WordPress?
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