I write most professional correspondence in either plaintext (markdown) or latex+pdf. I recently had to make two versions of the same document in latex and Google Docs.1 1This is unnatural. The medium of communication affects both the reading and writing experience. But I don't explain why, and instead merely comment on how. Eventually the latex+pdf version will be made public, so I write the initial draft in latex.
The Venting Part
Latex is a more powerful and easier drafting language than Google Docs. Something that surprised me is that table placement is actually radically easier in latex than Google Docs - this blew my mind. I think there is no way to have a table in Google Docs that will not break across different pages!
Or actually, there is, but it's clearly a kludge. You can set it so that Google Docs tables won't split a single large row across different pages. And you can embed one table inside another table. So to make an unbreakable table, you embed it inside a 1x1 table with unsplittable rows.2 2Awful awful kludge. But to be totally fair, I also routinely use some kludges in final latex rendering, so this is perhaps a wash.
One common reason to want tables to not split is to let them flow with text. If you change text position, then you want tables to move appropriately. And almost every table or figure or graphic should probably have a caption, and (I guess) the best way to have a caption is also via a table. For tables, you just add a merged row and write the caption there. For other figures, you embed the figure in a table, add a row and put the caption. There is no other sane way to keep the figure and caption together that I've seen.3 3Or you could do what I've seen many others do, which is generate the caption as part of the figure and then have a single PNG to place. Also awful. And if these are allowed to float in a document, then sometimes you can have the table/figure on one page and the caption on the next — and there is no way4 4Lies! You just also put these into 1x1 tables. to prevent this!
Finally, Google Docs is a citation and figure labelling nightmare. I understand now that poor bibliography styles exist because of a lack of drafting support.
The Tips Part
I will have to do this again. I note the tricks that are useful.
The short theme is treat 1xN tables like HTML container divs and use these to place things well.
- To add a caption to a figure/table/graphic, put the graphic in a table and add a row for the caption. Center the text, adjust the fontsize as appropriate, and that's fine.
- To prevent the caption from separating from the table in editing, put the whole table into a new 1x1 table.
- Google Docs recognizes that putting tables in tables is weird and sometimes guesses that when you paste a table into a table, you probably meant to replace the whole first table with the pasted table. To force this behavior to not happen, deliberately create an empty 1x1 table inside the containing table and then paste into it. Then Google Docs will apply this logic to the 1x1 table. Instead of the triply-nested tables that you might expect, you'll only have the (admittedly pathological) double nesting.
- If you have side-by-side tables, put them in a 1xN table. Manually adjust whitespace in each half. This is a painful construction in Google Docs.
- Whitespace around tables can be shrunk but not removed. Deal with it.
- For my purposes, the default for tables/figures/graphics are inline-text, centered, no-wrapped. These settings allow the best copy-paste, inline-suggestion, and inline-editing experiences for others.
- After edits, headers might be separated from their content. If my understanding of this is correct, the actual solution is to manually correct whitespace later. You can partially obviate this through judicious use of newpages.
- Google Docs TOC management is relatively pleasant and functional. There is one exception:5 5for a latex user who is used to being able to manipulate TOCs more directly the way to have a heading or subheading appear in the text but not in the TOC is to actually make it plain text, but style it like an H1 or H2. It is possible to copy style without copying label. This is gross precisely because it's at the edge of WYSIWYG and STRUCTURE=DATA.
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