Google’s word processor introduces non-printable characters which, among other things, allow spaces and other line breaks to be displayed on the screen.
As surprising as it may seem, the word processor of the Google Docs office suite until now offered no option to display non-printing characters. This functionality, however essential on this kind of tools, has just been deployed on Google Docs.
To display non-printing characters in a Google Docs document, you will need to go to the View menu and then select the Show non-printing characters option. Activating this function will allow you to view all the layout elements on the screen, such as paragraphs, line breaks, spaces and other tabs. These are materialized by the presence of a small blue icon representing a sort of inverted P. If you’re an avid Word user, you’ve no doubt seen these characters, as Microsoft’s word processor has had it for a long time.
All of these are meant to give you an easy way to check the layout of your document. However, none of these characters will appear on your final document when printed.
As noted The Verge, the addition of this function that we all thought was already in place seems to be a response to a request from users. On Google’s bug tracker, more than 80 users voted for the integration of an option to display non-printing characters on Google Docs.
The deployment of this new feature began on January 9 for all users, but will take place over several days. In its blog post, Google indeed indicates that some users will have to be patient, as the option can take up to a fortnight to be available on Google Docs.
At the same time, Google announced that it has improved the voice features built into Google Docs as well as its Google Slide presentation tool to reduce transcription errors and minimize loss of audio content during transcription. These improvements mainly concern the function allowing to type and modify while speaking in a document as well as the automatic legend module of Slide which transcribes in real time the words of a speaker.
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