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by dna_polymerase 1572 days ago
Great, personally I'd prefer to properly format letters (DIN 5008-B, anyone) without the need for invisible tables. Insert graphics without them looking like the page did not load correctly and have some sort of macro, variable system to make proper use of templates. Also, I'd love to upload my company's fonts or something a simple as proper numbering in lists with lists in them, but that probably just me trying to use their business product as an actual business user.

Docs largely feels like an abandoned product, newer features don't address actual issues people have. They just add nice to haves that I could use if it wasn't so embarrassing to use docs in the first place.
2 comments
mattzito 1572 days ago
FWIW, the fonts issue isn’t a technical limitation, it’s a legal/licensing one. Font foundries license by the seat, and scenarios like docs where documents can be shared outside an organization and the font travels with it are against the rules. Office online has the same issue for the same reasons.

There are exceptions, where a company has developed a font internally and owns the font directly, but those are far and few between. Even when a company has commissioned a font from a foundry, they’re usually licensing it from the foundry rather than owning it themselves as a work for hire.

(Source: googler, used to work on workspace, and through a random series of events ended up working closely with the google fonts team on this problem)

EDIT: also, you should be able to use apps script to do document generation from templates, that’s a pretty common use case.

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Veen 1572 days ago
The missing feature I find most irritating is the lack of sophisticated paragraph and character style options. Normal text plus a bunch of headings isn't sufficient for the sort of documents I need to write.
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nyanpasu64 1572 days ago
My #1 complaint about Google Docs formatting is the lack of inline/block semantic code styles, and my primary complaint about Markdown is having to spam backslashes to escape variable names and math expressions outside of code blocks (I also wish it had multicolored highlighting like Google Docs, but that's just my idiosyncratic way of taking notes on code and color-coding values by type/origin).
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