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I’ve started using Google Docs in earnest again. Before, I hadn’t really used the fold­ers at all, and I’d left every­thing on the “inbox” page, which made it rather clut­tered. But today I orga­nized my fold­ers and put every­thing in its proper place, then cleaned up the inbox page (dash­board? I don’t know what it’s called) so only the stuff I’m work­ing on shows up. And it feels good. I’m going to start using Google Docs more in my writ­ing process, stor­ing every­thing there.

One of the things that’s kept me from using Google Docs for my writ­ing, though, is that the default doc­u­ment look — über-wide (well, fit­ting your browser width) and no white space around the edges — doesn’t jive well with me. It’s tol­er­a­ble, but not con­ducive to work.

Luck­ily I can change it: by click­ing on Edit->Edit HTML, I can add a <div> wrap­per that looks like this:


<div style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto; padding: 15px 30px; border-left: solid 1px #eee; border-right: solid 1px #eee; font-family: Arial">
blah blah blah
</div>


(”width” sets the width, obvi­ously; “margin: 0px auto” cen­ters the whole doc­u­ment on the screen; “padding: 15px 30px” gives it some breath­ing room; the bor­ders act as the edges of the doc­u­ment; and I prefer Arial to Ver­dana for edit­ing text.)

Anyway, the whole expe­ri­ence feels good (espe­cially with the new Google Docs look for doc­u­ments), enough of an improve­ment that I’m actu­ally moti­vated to use it. Already I can tell that it’s going to become a main­stay of my life as a writer. This is good.

Now if only I could make my <div> hack the default… (And I want styles, so play­writ­ing will be easier. With­out styles it’s a heck of a lot of formatting.)