I used to be madly in love with Google Docs. What an awesome idea – to have an online word processor and storage space for all your spreadsheets, documents, and powerpoint shows. In fact, I was a fan of Docs before Google bought the product, when it was known as Writely.
Along the path to stardom, however, I think Docs got broken. In the olden days, Docs worked fairly seamlessly with Microsoft Word. You could import and export between the two fairly well, with little loss in formatting. That’s not true any more, much to my annoyance. Docs tends to strip out a lot of Word’s formatting when you import a document now. So I let writing in Docs fall by the wayside, only visiting now and then.
One reason I like to use online word processors for writing manuscripts is because I switch between several computers. At home, I use a large desktop, but since WebDoggie Dawson often likes to sit in my chair with me, it’s more comfortable if I take a laptop out in the living room to write. That move necessitates picking one of three laptops to use – which is a decision based on which one is available at the moment and which one needs a little TLC. Additionally, I like to be able to access my manuscript at work, during my lunch hour of course. I can’t use any kind of portable media, like flash drives, on my office computer, so online access is preferred.
So the other day I set out on a mission to create a manuscript format in Google Docs. My requirements were: 1 inch margins all around, line spacing set at 25pt, Times New Roman font at 12pt, and my most challenging requirements: a first line hanging indent of 1/2 inch.
Natively, Google Docs can handle the margins and font without a problem. Their line spacing, however, is set for the standard 1, 1.5. and double line spacing. And it doesn’t have any resemblence to a hanging indent at all. My goal was to create a manuscript template, something I could open, make a copy of, rename, and automatically have all the settings ready for me.
But, Docs does have the ability to format a web page using HTML and CSS. My CSS skills are of the trial and error kind, but after a few minutes of brushing up on the W3C website, I managed to put together most of the code I needed.
In case you want to try this, here’s the steps and CSS:
1. Open a new Google Doc and name it Manuscript Format or something unique of your choice.
2. Under the EDIT menu, select “Edit CSS”
3. Add the following:
body {
font: Time New Roman;
font-size: 12pt;
line-height: 25pt!important;
text-indent: .5in;
}
I chose to use the body element (or is it a class, I can’t keep them straight) so the hanging indent would work properly even if I went back up into the document and added stuff. When I first tried it using the paragraph element, that didn’t work at all.
My next goal was to create headers and footers in my template. That one required a little finessing, because I wanted dynamic page numbering. But a little Google searching and I found what I needed.
4. Insert a header and footer using the INSERT command.
5. Put placeholders in the Header like “Manuscript Name/Author Name” for whatever you normally put in your header.
6. Go to EDIT> EDIT HTML
7. Find the HTML for the footer at the bottom. It will say:
<DIV class=google_footer id=google_footer </DIV>
Change to:
<DIV class=google_footer id=google_footer style=”TEXT-ALIGN: right”><SPAN class=google_pagenumber>1</SPAN> </DIV>
Save your HTML changes.
Don’t worry about that page number being a hard-coded 1 – it will update dynamically during a print. You can verify this during a print preview.
The only thing I haven’t figured out how to fix yet is the indent being applied to the header. I’ve taken it out, written a class for the header to remove it and yet Docs keeps putting it back in. I know it’s because I’ve used the body element, and the header is part of the body. Just wish I could figure out a way around that.
Now, this isn’t perfect. The format looks pretty good on the screen and it’ll print well from Google Docs. But exporting to Word is useless, as it strips the hanging indent and ignores the line spacing. And the header and footers are only applied to the first page.
I queried on GDoc help page and got one good response. If you export the document as HTML (instead of Word or RTF), then open the HTML in Word, you retain quite a bit of the formatting. I’m not altogether happy about the line spacing – but I’m going to work on that further. But the hanging indents are retained nicely. Still have work on the header and footer, tho.
