Completely remove pages from Google Doc?

Question

I am writing a long Google Doc, which will never be printed, and therefore have absolutely no use for the ancient concept of 'pages'.

I therefore want to remove this distracting overhead from the doc, so that it is exactly like 1 long, long page.

This is what the end of one page and start of another currently looks like (hint: it doesn't look problematic at all):

But now consider the unnecessary confusion caused when tables are used.

Here is a minimal example, without many other aspects of complexity (e.g. multiple columns, images). Here's what happens when you simply use tables in the google doc with pages:

The second line in the third cell looks like the fourth cell. This can be extremely problematic in many different ways. In this small example it doesn't matter, but it can matter (a lot) in other documents, and it can cause unwanted ambiguity, confusion, and inaccuracy.

What I'm after

I simply want one very long google doc, without any concept of "pages", if this is possible it would make my doc more coherent and far more easily read.

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible to do - reference this answer from stack overflow.

In short - install the Page Sizer add-on from from the add-ons menu within Google Docs and make the page really long.

Collaborators will also benefit from the setting.

Answer 2

Update:

Few days ago (Feb 2022) Google announced the launch of "Pageless" mode in Google Docs.

Open a document in Google Docs web app then click on the File menu > Page Setup. The page setup dialog now shows a "Pageless" tab.

Resources

• Change a document’s page setup: pages or pageless

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It's not possible to completely get rid of the page height limit indicators by using built-in features.

If your document is not too big (less than 11 letter portrait pages), use Google Apps Script to set the height of the document to something slight larger to the sum of all the pages heights of your document.

Another workaround is to use a web browser extension to run a user script to modify on the fly the document CSS. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/52870899/1595451 for details.

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Using Google Apps Script

1. Set the top and bottom margin to 0.
   1. Click File > Page setup
   2. Set top and bottom margins to 0, then click OK
2. See how many pages have your document
   1. Click Tools > Word count this will show the number of pages.
3. Run the script to set the page height
   1. Click Tools > Script editor
   2. Paste the following code

   function setPageHeight() {
     const body = DocumentApp.getActiveDocument().getBody();
     const numberOfPages = 2;
     const pageHeight = body.getPageHeight();
     body.setPageHeight(pageHeight * numberOfPages);
   }
   

   3. Update the value assigned to numberOfPages to the expected total number of pages assuming that you keep the current page size.
      NOTES: Page Sizer add-on (referred on the previous answer) have a maximum size of 120 inches (less than 11 letter sized pages) Ref. https://stackoverflow.com/a/45044947/1595451. Use a bigger number with caution. If you use a height to too big the best case is that the script will throw an error, but there is a slight possibility to cause some undesired effects as making the document slow to load or in the worst case the document might become corrupted (the document becomes unusable / lost the content). You might want to make a backup copy if you are unsure about the effects of the number of pages that you want to set.
4. Execute the script
   1. Click Run. If you were required to authorize the script, authorize it, then click Run again.

Related

• Is Google Docs' maximum 400 pages?