Google Docs will be supporting pageless documents

I'm really excited about this. It sounds silly but I think being so tied to physical paper is really holding Docs back. I print less than 1% of the documents that I work on and it adds unnecessary restrictions. Docs has a great collaborative editor with enough formatting to get basic semantics across. Furthermore the comments + suggestions for reviewing is best in class.

You used to be able to hide page breaks (with just a small line drawn that could be hidden with CSS) but the pages were still laid out, just the gap and margins were elided. This resulted in weird behaviour when trying to position tables, images and even paragraphs near that break (for example Google Docs would still add a break after a header to push a paragraph onto the next page).

One exception was the Android client (and presumably iOS) which did re-wrap documents for easy reading on a small screen.

Before this announcement I had started to experiment with Dropbox Paper and its mail selling point is that (despite the name) it doesn't care about physical paper at all. Even though there are a couple of nice features on paper (like drag+drop lists and easy paste to link) the lack of suggestions and weak sharing control really make me miss Google Docs. However with this announcement and the departure from this strong adherence to physical paper I have hope that Google Docs will continue to be my preferred option for collaborative digital documents.

Having to use GDocs for work sometimes I'm really happy about this, although I can't believe it took so long.