Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Latex XML?
ismorphic to xml. it's markup. not structured data
Pretty sure database is also isomorphic to XML, in that sense. I agree that Notion-ish documents are more structured than Word-ish, though.
Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
31–40 of 233 posts
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#32As 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…
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!
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#33I'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…
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.
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#34Great, 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 u…
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.
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).
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#35I 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.
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#36Welcome to 2022, Google Docs. Unfortunately there's still a long way to Notion or Dropbox Paper.
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.
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.
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#37Earlier 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.
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.
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#38A "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.
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#39I 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