Last Updated: September 09, 2019
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98.11K
· zaus

2-page view in Google Docs

Many of us have giant or widescreen monitors, so the fact that Google Docs (the text-editor) restricts you to a single centered page is rather annoying.

Most PDF viewers have the option to view two pages side-by-side in continuous scroll mode, but is this possible in GDocs?

Sure, you can dock the whole tab to the left or right and get half your screen back, but where's the fun in that?

After inspecting the page source from "Print Layout" view, it looks like there are a couple places we can tweak the CSS:

.kix-zoomdocumentplugin-outer { left:0px !important; }
.kix-zoomdocumentplugin-outer, .kix-zoomdocumentplugin-inner { width:100%; }
.kix-page { float:left; width:48% !important; }

Until the Google Engineers get around to allowing this, you can fake it with the following [bookmarklet][1]:

(function(d,t,z,s) {
s = d.createElement(t);
s.innerHTML = z+'-outer{left:0px !important;}'+z+'-outer,'+z+'-inner{width:100% !important;}.kix-page{float:left; width:48% !important;}';
d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0].parentNode.appendChild(s);
})(document, 'style', '.kix-zoomdocumentplugin');

[1]: (javascript:(function(d,t,z,s){s=d.createElement(t);s.innerHTML=z+'-outer{left:0px !important;}'+z+'-outer,'+z+'-inner{width:100% !important;}.kix-page{float:left; width:48% !important;}';d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0].parentNode.appendChild(s);})(document,'style','.kix-zoomdocumentplugin');)

4 Responses
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Works nicely expect if messes up cursor positioning, nice for reviewing documents but if you are still editing the doc then it's a bit problematic.

over 1 year ago ·

@verymickey yup, unfortunately

over 1 year ago ·

I used to be able to get a two-page view, I forget if this was with embedded=TRUE or not, by simply pressing the 2</code> key. No idea why they removed that functionality.

over 1 year ago ·

I wrote a plugin to allow toggling this type of view, my solution is a little different than yours:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/side-by-side-view-for-goo/klojnkbccembmfbplidbaiblodibiccg

Here's the source:
https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/side_by_side_gdocs

over 1 year ago ·