docs

The newly released Google Docs app for Android smartphones and tablets has more than just editing and viewing documents up its sleeve. It also allows you to snap a picture of a page of text with the camera on your device, and it will OCR and convert it to an editable document. 

Obviously, it can’t work its magic universally … handwriting, and complex fonts are beyond machine text recognition. But this takes us one step closer to being able to do Interlibrary Loan from a cellphone. 

It isn’t often that one becomes excited about pagination, but when it’s a feature that makes Google Docs even better, I suppose it’s time. Today, Google announced that word processing documents in Google Docs will display pagination, accurately representing printed pages in the style of Microsoft Word and other word processors. I know lots of students will be excited to finally be able to tell when their 3-page paper is done, without having to do a print preview. 

Finally! Google Docs announces that it will roll out mobile editing capabilities over the next few days to users of Android devices running 2.2 or higher and iOS devices (including the iPad) running 3.0 or higher.

It’s been too long in coming, but I think I speak for everyone when I say that I’m going to use this like crazy. I start nearly every writing project on Google Docs these days, and this is going to make everything much easier to manage for my writing.

New version of Google Docs rolling out over the next few days, with a new drawing tool rollling out today to users. Very exciting stuff…it looks like they really improved the “printability” of the documents. I can’t wait to try it out.