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Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

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Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#161

Post by Andrex »

samwillis wrote: post #24

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 imple…

> 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...

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#162

Post by k__ »

spookthesunset wrote: post #132
k__ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

I didn't like the page breaks either, but I never had big issues with them.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#165

Post by CodeIsTheEnd »

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/

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#166

Post by cxr »

mbreese wrote: post #87
wiredfool wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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.)

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#167

Post by slightwinder »

oreilles wrote: post #55
afandian wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely once you've got a block inside a block you're back to the XML model again?

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.

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.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#168

Post by Andrex »

Already__Taken wrote: post #14
chippiewill wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

The table limitations in Docs are really the biggest thing that grind my gears about the service.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#169

Post by tommoor »

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.
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