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Google adds pagination to Google Docs

The editor in Google Docs can now show page breaks in a document. Also, you no longer need to convert documents to PDFs before printing them in Chrome.

Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
Lance Whitney

Google Docs users can now finally see page breaks in their documents, thanks to the latest update rolled out yesterday by the search giant.

Rather than display your documents as one long compact stream, the new pagination option visually shows each separate page, mimicking the traditional page view long found in Microsoft Word and other word processors. The option works in all the major browsers, not just Chrome, and can be turned on and off by clicking on the View menu, choosing Document View, and then opting for Pagination or Compact view.

The new option displays both automatic and manual page breaks and ensures that headers will appear at the top of each page and footers at the bottom, according to Google.

Beyond the move to pagination, Google has improved printing from Google Docs. In the past, any document you wanted to print was first automatically converted into a PDF, forcing you to print it from your default PDF reader. But Google now supports native printing, which bypasses the PDF creation to lets you print your document directly from the browser.

For now, the new and improved printing works only in Chrome, not in any of the other major browsers. But Google said it's hopeful that other browser makers will adopt the same Web standard to support native printing.