Sad, that its only a fixed width and not page view. It should be possible to create a page view in combination with priting it through the pdf format as they are doing already. |
It seems to remember the last selection and makes that the default for new documents, at least when I tried. The default for a new account is the full-width page. |
Yeah, but Google is all about the speed. Rendering PDFs takes extra time. Rendering PDFs and analyzing page breaks for web view takes even longer.
The best Google could do is store "common knowledge" about fonts, monitor DPI, margins and paper sizes and dynamically calculate them for each document to approximate where the page breaks will go.
Unfortunately, this is by design. Pure X/HTML is designed for text markup in electronic networked data storage systems. NOT paper or design. TeX and Adobe's Postscript/PDF are design and paper languages. Bolting paper features on to a web document language is about as sensible as bolting web features onto a paper document language. Unfortunately, both have happened, thanks to Adobe and many others.
Back on topic. Now, I happen to love this "fixed width" infinite page as a great compromise. I can READ text faster when I don't have to move my eyes as far. They get a shiny gold star for this.
There are only 2 things that could make this feature perfect:
1. Allow us to set the width of the fixed width (although their default is quite nice)
2. Allow a multi-page/multicolumn view, regardless of actual page breaks, WITHOUT VERTICAL SCROLLING. I want the equivalent of reading a book on my monitor. This pretty much requires being able to do #1 as well.
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Well I have a couple of reasons I like this
* Reading documents on a Widescreen monitor
* My teacher once complained about the layout, so I had to show him the work as the Firefox Print preview :-P
A few days ago one of my friends saw Google Docs and said they where amazed at how many "Word" features they managed to fit in. As I've been using it since Writely I guess I just saw a feature being added every month or so and didn't notice it :-D |
But without the page breaks this isn't really adding much. For example the only reason I tend to copy my google doc into writer or word is to check whether images or other resources get onto the right page.
PS. I never even considered the face that one would prefer the shorter lines because of eye movement, but in that case they really should add the option to create multiple colums with horizontal scrolling (I believe horizontal scrolling is underestimated), as this fixed with is quite simplistic on a screen with 1800+ pixels width. |
It's sad that the fixed-with page view doesn't know about your Google Docs document print settings. So it ignores paper width and orientation, and the top, left and right margins you have set.
Getting a real page view must be very hard to accomplish in XHTML and CSS, but getting the above settings correctly reflected in this 'page' view shouldn't be that hard.
Once again a half-baked new feature... :( |
Excellent, now all we need is page breaks with page numbers and GDocs is set. |
![[put at-character here]](image/at.gif) Miser, Yes, adding Page View along with page separation etc can be done on online apps (including Page Numbers etc). We did these in Zoho Writer few months back.
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I prefer this view, even without the page breaks. This will make it easier to read and edit docs on a wide screen monitor. Less horizontal movement for the eyes. |
I think this new feature has been rolled online progressively, because last night there was nothing and this morning I can finally see the changes. |
Automatic page break would be even more useful .. but this is already making Google Docs close to perfect .. |
Early today I was on Google docs and I was feeling really annoyed by the writer's width, and while working and doing some research I found this post.
Thank you very much. Luis From buenseo.com.ar [unlinked] |
