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Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

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Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#41

Post by polote »

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…

I dont think hardest things to implement is something Google cares of. They dont have any resources constraint

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#42

Post by Lealen »

theptip wrote: post #36
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.

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…

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/

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#43

Post by makeitdouble »

dpkrjb wrote: post #28
lewisjoe wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#44

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

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.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#45

Post by BrianOnHN »

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...

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#46

Post by da39a3ee »

cs702 wrote: post #38

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.

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.

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#47

Post by deanebarker »

cs702 wrote: post #38

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.

This is exactly what I was thinking. I read that page, and at the end, I thought "...so HTML then?"

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#49

Post by k__ »

lewisjoe wrote: post #4

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…

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...

Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless

#50

Post by falcor84 »

ithkuil wrote: post #39

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

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.
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