Today I discovered that Google Docs has supported pageless documents for over a year and a half. I learned this at precisely the right time, and now I’m rethinking how I handle many of my digital documents.
Paper and PDFs
I grew up writing in Microsoft Word, while in high school and college I mostly used Google Docs. In college math classes I switched to \LaTeX, but the effect of all of these is the same: Their ultimate target is traditional document structures that have been around a long time. Whether it’s a print or digital output, pagination of the documents is important. You expect to be able to reference a particular page, and if you ever do want to print it out, separate pages are rather important.
As such, I’m used to having pages in all my documents. I frequently export to PDF, the de-facto digital paper of our era, and it’s hard to break out of that mindset. Besides, I love books and notebooks as physical objects. I’ve spent too much time learning publishing software tools. I reformatted my entire college thesis so I could print it as a book. I’ve purchased dozens of leather-bound journals. Pages are a natural item because they are physically practical, and so our digital documents tend to follow suit.
I remember when Dropbox came out with their Paper product, a canvas-style document that infinitely scrolls. I considered it for a moment but ultimately disregarded it as a bit silly. I already used Google Docs for shared documents, and its individual pages worked just fine for me.
I was never closer to embracing a pageless world than while using Notability in college on my iPad. The interface is a near-seamless scrollable page, but the only backup solution was saving them as PDFs to a cloud storage system. This forced the app interface to show where the pages started and ended, and you needed to account for that while writing. Again, this was natural to me: PDFs are portable and, these days, nigh universal. What were all these people doing on OneNote and its infinite canvas approach? Didn’t they know their files were going to be a mess if they exported them to share with others? Besides, mild constraints are good. Formatting is good. I never understood the draw.
Websites Are a Thing
My one version of “pageless” information is this blog. Each post lives on its own, regardless of its length. A rather long post, like a certain movie review I wrote a few years ago, remains as one page even though, if printed, it would probably span almost a dozen pages. So it is with the web. While we organize websites into “pages” because user interfaces matter, each individual page is flexible in its size and breaking it up is, hopefully, for the benefit of the user.
Even still, you can see I’m not committed to the idea of an infinitely scrolling page when you first arrive on my blog. I only keep four posts on there at a time, and you have to page over to find more. Other blogs don’t operate like this, and that’s fine for them. I stand by my decision, and it fits into my mental framework of using pages as logical and visual separators.
But what happens when that separation becomes an obstacle to communication?
Ugly, Time-Consuming Documentation
My daily work often involves writing documentation. This could be expanding on a policy our team is enacting—those documents contain text and nothing else—or detailed step-by-step directions on how to use a new piece of technology. These latter pieces contain images and GIFs. They are rich documents with a terrible variety in formatting. It turns out that getting screenshots to nicely fit on a digital letter-sized piece of paper is awfully difficult.
Here is what would typically happen: I know for two steps in my documentation, I need two short paragraphs each followed by a screenshot that shows where to click to enact whatever explanation I provided. I write those paragraphs, and toss in the screenshots. Suddenly I’m left with a page that has text, an image, more text, and then a large white space that is just a little too small to fit the second image.
I then take the time to resize both images so they have the same dimensions while fitting on the one page alongside the text, because it’s a bad user experience to break up the information. People may miss a step or get annoyed—I know I would, which is why I’m aggravating myself by trying to fix it. Maybe I can almost get it to fit, but the image now looks too small. Do I remove some of the explanation to make it fit? Sometimes that works because I was too verbose on the first pass, but that isn’t always true and isn’t a scalable solution for internal documentation. Now I’m frustrated, and all this effort takes time away from the actual work I’m trying to complete.
On the day I’m writing this post1November 28, if anyone is interested. No, I was not writing documentation and then ranting about it a few days before Christmas. I found myself in exactly this position. I was writing an important document that would lay down foundational information for my coworkers, and it was full of images and GIFs showing complicated steps in some software. Nothing was fitting correctly, so I thought, Why not give myself some more space?
I went to the Page Setup menu on the document and selected an A3 size. Spacious, roomy, and a bit ridiculous on the screen. I felt mostly comfortable with my decision until I went back to the document and saw it still didn’t fix my problem. Information was still cut off, text and images were separated, and it was all a mess.
Back I went to Page Setup in a naive attempt to mess with the page dimensions until something would work—as if it ever would. And then I saw it: An option to change the document to a pageless view. Amazing!
This was the panacea I was seeking. I could toss images and GIFs in, resize them to be wider than the text if I so pleased, and nothing would be separated. I now had a linear document with a natural flow. It even had a few niceties like collapsing section headers, which eases navigation. I was incredibly pleased and could return to writing the document itself with no formatting interruptions.2I did hit one snag that has intermittently happened over the last couple years. I insert a GIF, it plays a few times, then it disappears and is replaced with a gray “image not found” kind of placeholder. It doesn’t actually say that, but it’s the vibe I get. Eventually it magically fixes itself.
Audience First
I’m sorry to all my lovely writing teachers from over the years. I forgot to consider my audience when I embarked on my various projects.
Documentation in my company is, to a close approximation, exclusively viewed in Google Docs. Internal processes are maintained in Docs, and that’s that. Just like someone who commits to Dropbox as an enterprise solution may have gone all-in on Paper, or someone in the Apple world may deign to subject their friends to shared Notes or Pages documents, Google Drive is an ecosystem that contains everything my company has and shares.
Turning documentation into pageless Docs makes perfect sense in this context. It simplifies so much of the writing process, and I believe makes reading the end result more pleasant as well. Navigating those documents is slick, and there’s no jarring jump between pages. I’ve now set my default document to be Pageless on my work Docs account. We’ll see if that sticks, because I do still create documents that are targeted at an external audience and need to be exported and viewed as a PDF. I’m unsure how frequently I do one versus the other, but my hunch is that the pageless view stick around.
This experience leaves me wondering where else I already unwittingly use pageless documents, and where I could implement them. My Obsidian documents for running The Last Question are all Markdown files, and thus have no pages. That is a paradigm I’m quite familiar with.3I also write all my prose in Markdown first these days, but I do eventually target a PDF as the end result. As it is, though, the audience of my draft is me. I don’t care if the PDF export isn’t perfect. If the audience becomes others, I would take the time to recreate the document in proper software for that purpose. Podcast show notes don’t particularly benefit from having pages, except in the rare circumstances we try to “hide” something from each other. That may be an avenue I explore.
I’m glad I had this discovery. Sometimes you need just the right nudge at precisely the right time to view the world a little differently. I now have a fresh tool to consider when I begin a project, and I believe I’ll benefit from being comfortable with the option.
- 1November 28, if anyone is interested. No, I was not writing documentation and then ranting about it a few days before Christmas.
- 2I did hit one snag that has intermittently happened over the last couple years. I insert a GIF, it plays a few times, then it disappears and is replaced with a gray “image not found” kind of placeholder. It doesn’t actually say that, but it’s the vibe I get. Eventually it magically fixes itself.
- 3I also write all my prose in Markdown first these days, but I do eventually target a PDF as the end result. As it is, though, the audience of my draft is me. I don’t care if the PDF export isn’t perfect. If the audience becomes others, I would take the time to recreate the document in proper software for that purpose.