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I'd like to create an invoice in Docs. My information should be on the upper right corner - on every page. The element used for this shouldn't have 'a flow', so that it doesn't influence the header's fixed height.

VisualExplanation

Trying to use a drawing with a text-box inside it, like suggested in the product-forum, doesn't seem to work too well: the text, even though it's the same font and size, looks different than the text inside the real document. It is being rendered as pixel-data which seems to make it blurry or not as sharp as the real text. I didn't resize/scale the drawing itself.

Is there any workaround for this blurry text?

Or is there a possibility to use any other element (which can hold text) with "absolute positioning"?

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  • You have said "The header shouldn't grow with the information, because the information takes some space (and is taller than the header)." - but really you need to say what should happen here. Are you wanting the header to be a scrolling text-box? or?
    – MaryC.fromNZ
    Jul 15, 2015 at 12:48
  • In principle, using a drawing programme to create an invoice just sounds wrong. Why are you using a drawing, rather than a spreadsheet (if you want calculations) or a document? (I'm sure there's a reason, but I'm not clear what it is from your question.)
    – MaryC.fromNZ
    Jul 15, 2015 at 12:50
  • Hi Mary, regarding your first comment, I updated the answer. To your second comment: I know, this also sounds wrong to me - I tried this, because it was suggested as a workaround in the Google Products Forum for Docs. And I'd like to use Docs instead of Spreadsheet, because it should be meant for this and writing in it is more convenient. Is this understandable? :)
    – Sebastian G. Marinescu
    Jul 15, 2015 at 15:38

7 Answers 7

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So far there is no way to work around the blurry text beside just using the regular text on the document. I know what you mean by blurry text because I just tried using in a document (for answering this question). Some suggestions are:

  1. Try copying the image of the drawing with text and paste it into a new Google Document. This was suggested on a Google Product forum. When I tried it I did not see a real huge difference to be honest but it's worth a try.

  2. Have you tried writing your whole document in the drawing tab? You may not notice the blurriness because it is all the same. I have tried this and it looks pretty good but I can not speak for you. Try that and see what you think!

  3. Consider using another document creator program like: Buzzword, ZOHO, Etherpad, Hackpad (despite the name it's useful). Please know that ZOHO and HackPad are online like Google Docs. I strongly recommend checking these out as some of these programs actually seem pretty useful and you may find that they will be good for your scenario.

Sorry I could not have been more helpful. I know this probably was not the greatest news but Google has a lot of tweaks to continue making to Google docs before it can compare to other document creators out there.

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  • Thx for your answer. To 1: Doesn't really work. To 2: This is not considerable. To 3: seeing that Docs isn't a good replacement for Office-Apps, these alternatives seem worth a look and try. Thx for your efforts.
    – Sebastian G. Marinescu
    Jul 17, 2015 at 11:06
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Here's a very temporary workaround that I found:

  1. Resize the drawing to be very large
  2. Toggle the alignment type to either "In Line" or "Wrap Text", then back to its original state
  3. Resize the image down to its original size

This will make the image less blurry, but also reset to blurriness every time the document is reloaded or the drawing is edited.

Video of process: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_Q5x1Nsa--ea0E4RkFxb1lhaWc/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-2e-GekKaZ5pzZL9eFOqQdw

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  • This is a hack but actually works - underrated answer!
    – SCBuergel
    Nov 29, 2019 at 3:23
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You have said that you want this on every page.

I do not believe that you will be able to achieve this in Docs, because the only elements that can be automatically repeated on every page are the the Header and Footer, and your diagram shows that you want the fixed content below the header, alongside the non-fixed content..

However, you could design a one-page template. Put a two-column table in the body section (ie between the header and footer). In the right-hand column, put your fixed information. Then set up the left hand column as required to do a mail merge (not natively supported by Docs, but if you google there are a number of add-ins that enable this). Then mail-merge to generate your full document.

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  • This seems like a legitimate possible workaround. But still, I also start to think, that Google Docs isn't production-ready yet. Thx for your answer!
    – Sebastian G. Marinescu
    Jul 17, 2015 at 11:00
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I use a Chromebook,but I'm sure this trick would work with any operating system. My work around is to take a screenshot of my finished work and then insert it into my doc that way. This preserves the quality of both the image and text exactly as I made it in the drawing. Give it try.

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I fixed this by creating a separate drawing object with double the page size, then inserting the linked drawing document into the doc. The text is much clearer.

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I had this same problem too.

What I did was, in the drawing, I clicked actions > download as... > PNG and inserted the PNG back into the document.

Hope this helps!

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I just copy-paste the image into a slides document (selected all elements in the drawing object), this appears to handle the drawing differently and it is as sharp as can be. Not sure if you could combine, or make, your doc in Slides

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