Google Docs has long had the ability to publish documents to the web, either to a select group of fellow viewers and editors, or for general consumption. But two additional features make it a potentially useful and simple way to publish all manner of complicated documents. First is the ability to easily create links from one document to the other. And the other is the ability to control the rather lackluster layout of the publish documents via the new “Edit CSS” feature.
For instance, I’ve been tinkering with putting together some grammar guides for my students, as a little extra help on topics with which they have the most trouble. So I created this one on possessive nouns and pronouns (you’d be amazed how many college students have trouble with these). I was pretty happy with that, so I decided to do one on another common problem, pronoun case. Then I realized I might as well create a table of contents and link these to it (and link out to any new ones I create).
(I’m still working on the title. The current one seems too stuffy. I’m tempted to call it “Wheat’s Grammar Book,” but I don’t want my students calling me “Wheat.”)
I use a tiny bit of CSS to make the published versions look more like they do in Google Doc’s word processor’s fairly new “fixed-width page view” (it’s an option on the “View” menu). You can add it via the “Edit CSS…” command (which is on the “Edit” menu):
body { width: 800px; margin: 32px; padding: 32px; border: 1px solid gray; }