Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ithkuil 1569 days ago
I like to be able to ditch the page splits.

But I'd love to have an option to keep the "paper" shape, albeit an infinite strip (toilet paper style).

All this white horizontal space distracts me

2 comments

I know that's not what you meant, but I just want to say that I would probably fight to the death against a redesign that would remove the page splits from my toilet paper.
But think of how much less paper you'd throw away in switching to one of those endless towel rolls.
I'm not so certain you'd be saving. Unless you get a TP holder with sharp metal teeth and consistently use it to get straight cuts to avoid wasting a good part of each roll on those angle tears.
...I'll stick to my Japanese washlet, I think.
Is "View > Print layout" what you're looking for? It replaces page splits (header/footer whitspace and page margins) with a dashed line.
The dashed line is distracting and confuses when you are using dashed lines deliberately elsewhere. Why can't we just have an infinitely long canvas of a specific width? That's what I was expecting when I heard of pageless. Was disappointed. I'm not sure why I'd want to be able to set a minimal text width and then be left with infinite margin.
This kinda works but it very half assed.

- It breaks tables that cross pages in weird and confusing ways.

- It messes up spacing that crosses pages.

- It interacts poorly with footnotes.

- In results in weird gaps when images need to get pushed to the next page.

It is what I used before, but it is clearly a quick hack rather than a proper solution of actually not having pages.

yeah I use it and it works quite well but then people use footnotes and they look weird there; disallow footnotes and make that dotted grey line go away and I'm sold
also: the view is a user-setting. When I author some text I still need to think about how does it look when there is a page split (e.g. tables, figures etc) in case some of my colleagues may end up reading it in the "print layout mode.