Google Docs Adds Pagination and Native Printing

After two months of testing, Google Docs added a very useful feature: pagination. Google Docs adds “visual page breaks while you’re editing your documents, so now you can see how many pages of that report you’ve actually finished. Headers now show up at the top of each page instead of just at the top of your doc, manual page breaks actually move text onto a new page and footnotes appear at the bottom of the pages themselves.”


If you use Google Chrome, you’ll see an important change when printing a document: it’s no longer converted to PDF. “We’ve worked closely with the Chrome team to implement a recent web standard so we can support a feature called native printing. (…) With native printing, you can print directly from your browser and the printed document will always exactly match what you see on your screen,” explains Google. Until now, Google converted the document to PDF and you had to download the file and print it using Adobe Reader or a similar PDF viewer.

Google Docs looks more and more like an advanced word processor. You no longer have to use workarounds for basic features like pagination and printing.



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