Google Docs New Feature: Pageless • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#221

Post by mpalmer » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 4:29 AM UTC

rmbyrro wrote: post #118

> 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...

Side display of footnotes a la Tufte would be an enticing option, but I guess that's comment real estate in Docs.

https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/#:~:text=Sidenotes%3...

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#222

Post by lIIIllllIIII » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 4:59 AM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #203

cxr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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 machin…

Your comment sent me off on a mental tangent for a minute about what it would take to create a PCF - portable canvas format

I suddenly realised I was reinventing HTML!

Just allow people to export HTML/CSS for archival.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#223

Post by reilly3000 » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 6:19 AM UTC

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.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#224

Post by bdlowery » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 8:42 AM UTC

lf-non wrote: post #33

dpkrjb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Submitting assignments as pdf’s is extremely common at Universities. It feels like literally everything needs to be a pdf.

Also, when sending something to a client, it’s way more professional to send them a pdf document as an attachment they can open right in their browser instead of some obscure google docs / notion link.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#225

Post by smusamashah » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 9:56 AM UTC

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.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#226

Post by AnonC » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

lewisjoe wrote: post #142

AnonC wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pag…

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/

GP here: it would be a good idea to include this information directly on the product page.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#227

Post by adamfeldman » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #173

adamfeldman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

My criticism is all the "business" apps – CRM and Desk were the central pieces.

I haven't used the Mail app. My teams used Google Workspace for email etc.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#228

Post by bdlowery » Sat, Mar 05, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #204

dpkrjb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Use cases? I just want exactly what I have in notion… but printed to pdf. How is that taking away from “evolving their UX”.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#229

Post by anamax » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 1:59 AM UTC

notriddle wrote: post #206

anamax wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Is there some reason why you can't save the DOM or other datastructures that you help you query/manipulate the XML?

A database isn't a set of flat-file CSVs even though that's all that is actually needed to do everything that people do with databases (albeit one operation at a time). (The data may be normalized but the datastructures aren't necessarily.) Instead, a database is data together with some data structures (and relevant code) that are maintained to speed up operations on said data.

Why can't one persist auxillary datastructures for XML, including (but not limited to) the DOM?

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#230

Post by mbreese » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 3:39 AM UTC

lIIIllllIIII wrote: post #222

mbreese wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 machin…

Your comment sent me off on a mental tangent for a minute about what it would take to create a PCF - portable canvas format I suddenly realised I was reinventing HTML! Just allow people to export HTML/CSS for archival.

A full single-file archival HTML file would really get you pretty far in the regard (embedded CSS, no JS, data/base64 images). You might even convince me that JS is okay if needed to render the page, but a static dom would be better.