Published (to the web) Google document is suddenly displayed in a horrible way.

Hi, Ben,

 

Your document looks fine to me. My guess is that you might have accidentally changed your browser's zoom​:

Hi Jo S, thank you for your message. No this is not a zoom issue. I zoomed in and out in the past plenty and it never showed this kind of behavior or switched to the way it displays the doc as it does in the last 24 hours. I uploaded 2 screenshots to Imgur and added numbers to the first one and arrows to the second to make the problems more clearly.

With the first image (named image 1 in Imgur) you see a big header bar (however you want to call it) at the top and 2 text items with ridiculous big font sizes. In the image, I assigned numbers 1 to 3 to the problem areas. Until 24 hours ago this was a very small bar, with only the name of the document in it and it never moved up and down while scrolling through the text. It was stuck, up at the top of the webpage. Image 1 contains more numbers: numbers 4 and 5 are other problem areas with the way of how it suddenly is displayed. Look at how the text is all in the center and there are giant white spaces left and right. All that ”real estate” is not used, while it did use all that space before, up until 24 hours ago. The text was even hyper close to the edges of my screen. Number 6 of image 1 is also a problem area: the footer bar is. Also big, with big font size and just as the header bar it moves with the text while scrolling up and down. It is like the text moves up and down behind these giant header and footer bars now all of the sudden. 

All in all, both in height and width, the new way my document is displayed is highly compromised if we consider all the real estate that is either not used or overtaken by the header and footer bars. I have an eye disability and I NEED that space. I need to use ctrl + and - to make the document and letters bigger, but take a look at image 2 of the Imgur images that I added. The footer and header bars become colossal. They take in half the screen and I can only read 3 words per sentence and only 2 sentences are really readable and in full view. This was radically different just 24 hours ago. That header and footer bars were not there throughout my whole document (they stuck top (header bar) and the bottom (footer bar)), the text used the whole page area and when zooming in and out, there was far more text to read. 

As I’m spending hours solving this, I watched youtube videos and I time-stamped a video where you get an idea of how I used to see it, though there is one caveat. In this video, you see the footer bar, but that is due to not there being enough text to push it all down. The footer bar is in the center, but that makes clear that it is not stuck to the bottom and something that is pushed down as more text is added. The reason I’m so invested in this is due to my vision problems. I really need the way it was displayed in the past and I also worked on my document for so long. Any help is greatly appreciated. Cheers.

Hi, Ben,

 

If the problem is happening with all your documents, this means that there's either something in your browser or on your computer that is causing the problem.

 

To narrow things down a bit, please answer the following questions:

• Which operating system are you using?
• Which device are you using?
• Which browser (and browser version) are you using? 

 

I can confirm that something has changed - see for example this test document that also shows the "banner" header and footer strips and wide margins (silly on modern wide screen displays).

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQbcVg4DV2zL9Y2LYLc31Wsgww4PAANm37oqFwWIQqUXSd5oLHhfQlwN__oAP3kpgeitxkPMcL4WDHp/pub

Gill, would you like to escalate this (since you're experiencing it as well)?

 

It sounds like Ben is having problems with non-published documents in addition to the published one. Is that the case, Ben, or is this only affecting your published files?

 

Yes, i'll do that Jo.

I even affects landscape pages, wrapping lines far too short. Odd.

[i've reported a similar post here #link]

i have a 'work around' which will restore how a published google doc looks for you, to match the old style.

- chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en-GB

- firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

this is an adblocking extension, but we will be using it to change the styling of the page

open the extensions settings and go to the 'my filters' tab and paste in the following lines

Thank you for your reply. These are hopefully the answers you’re looking for:

1. Operating system: Microsoft Windows 10 - 64-Bit

2. Device: Asus Laptop (I clicked the device manager and it says ACPI 64 based). It is maybe important to mention that I link my laptop to a TV with a HDMI cable (as I have an eye condition).

3. Browser: Google Chrome 81.0.4044.129

4. This is only affecting my published files. Within Google docs where I do all my usual writing and editing, my text looks just like it has always looked. No problems there. 

Thank you for your reply.

Fantastic solution. I already had chrome and Ublock Origin (1.26.0 version) installed. I followed your instructions and it is almost like you said. At my end I only have 1 cosmetic issue: the font size with the name of the doc in the header remains big and breaks through the lower “barrier” of the header:

As for the rest I think I can confirm: The header stays at the top and is back to modest size, the extra text of 'updated every 5 minutes' is gone, no footer, the text is back to normal for me. This really is great and means a ton to me. Thank you again Tinnis and if you have any idea of how to solve that last issue, then that would be the cherry on the cake. 

I can also only second what you said about it being baffling (and stressful for me). I hope they reconsider this decision.

Hi, Ben,

 

Thanks for that information. It sounds like this is an issue that's affecting many other users, so my friend Gill has escalated it to the team to see if we can get more information. (Thank you, Gill!) Gill will keep you updated if we receive any news.

 

Tinnis, thank you for providing a workaround in the meantime!

 

@Ben Bennemans

You can either experiment with increasing the 30 pixel value of this line 

E.g.  50

docs.google.com###header:style(height: 50px !important) 

Or just hide the header entirely by changing it to

docs.google.com###header

Cheers

@ Gill , thank you for any future updates and good luck with the tests that you're running. 

You're very welcome, Ben. Hope you have a great rest of the week, too!