A detailed view of the comment box Finally, we think the comment feature will give you flexibility to work with your notes in an intuitive and user-friendly way.
You can delete a comment by pressing the trash can icon above a comment. Or, you can respond to a comment by pressing the reply arrow, and it will show up just below the comment you’re responding to. You can hide a comment by marking the “X” button at the top of the comment.
Collaboration at the next level The new version of Google documents is a built around collaboration, allowing you to work in real-time and to see what others are typing character by character. The new comment features makes it much easier to keep track of your ideas and notes while you work closely with others.
To try out improved commenting and other features, you’ll need to take the new preview version of Google documents for a test drive. You can opt-in by visiting the Editing tab in the Google Docs settings.
Bookmarks in the link dialog Finally, we added bookmarks to the link dialog. If you go into that dialog, you’ll see a list of all the bookmarks in your document and the snippet of text that’s near that bookmark.
Special Characters To insert characters that you can’t create with a regular keyboard, we also added a special characters dialog via Insert -> Special characters...
So if you’ve been dying to make a maze in the new word processor, then you’re in luck:
Metric Units If you’ve set your language to English US your ruler will be set in inches. But now, all other locales see the ruler with metric units:
In the future, we’ll make this a preference that can be changed, no matter what language you’ve set for your account.
Comment Scrolling One of the big pieces of feedback we heard is that the new documents didn’t handle long comments very well. If comments got too long, it became hard to tell which comments were associated with which text in the document.
Today we added automatic scrolling for comments, so whenever you click in a comment it will scroll so that it’s directly beside the associated text.
By far the most difficult thing the editor does is figure out where to draw text. For this, we built a new layout engine. Here’s an example of how the new engine works: say you type the letter ‘a’. We notice you pressed the ‘a’ key and respond by drawing a single ‘a’ off-screen. We then measure the width and height of that ‘a’, combine those measurements with the x and y position of your cursor, and place the ‘a’ at the correct spot on the screen. If you’re in the middle of a word, we push the characters after your cursor over. If you’re at the end of a line, the editor moves your word to the next line and pushes any overflow to the lines after it.
Tab stops and other basic features are impossible to support if you’re using the browser’s HTML layout engine for your text. That’s why we wrote our own engine: once we tell our layout engine how to draw a feature, we don’t have to worry about which features browsers support.
The formatting in this basic menu couldn’t be supported without writing a new layout engine
Improved collaboration
What I’ve just described is pretty standard architecture for a desktop word processor. But the new Google Docs isn’t just an online version of existing desktop software: it’s designed specifically for character-by-character real time collaboration. That kind of collaboration is only possible because we built the editor around a technology called operational transformation. It’s what lets multiple people edit the same area of a document at the same time without needing to wait for the server to say a particular edit is okay.
Building an extensible, fully collaborative online word processor required rewriting every part of the document editor from scratch. We’re still adding more features and polish before turning it on for everyone, but for an early peek, you can opt-in by visiting the Editing tab in the Google Docs settings.
Posted by: Jeff Harris, Product Manager, Google Docs
I'd love for this to be the beginning of a shared wireframe template repository in Google Docs. For now, I've shared a folder in which I'll add user contributed templates and stencils. Get in touch if you want to contribute.
I hope you'll enjoy the templates and that it will help you actually sketch out your ideas rather than just describe them in words. As Dan Roam said in his keynote at this year’s IA Summit, “The person who draws the picture wins."
