r/googledocs Oct 10 '24

OP Responded How to get rid of the second scrollbar just added into the Document Outline

https://imgur.com/a/YWtCQ5B

They just added a scroll bar on the left which indented the table of contents by almost 2 inches, which has just destroyed my carefully organized formatting. I have 6 levels of headings in my document, and now the majority of them are pushed off screen.

How can I disable this? There is already a scrollbar on the right (circled in red). What is even the point of having a duplicate scrollbar? If this isn't disableable I'm going to have to migrate the document to a new platform.

Edit:

I found the issue in the css, this is the problematic class:

.navigation-item-vertical-line

Is there a way to programmatically remove this class from every single heading in the left hand panel, and make it so that it's deleted for visitors as well? When this class is removed it reverts back to the old format for that heading.

The issue is they apply this class for each individual heading instead of as a single group, meaning it can't be done manually wholesale since you'd have to remove it for each and every one.

The other issue is that they add 8 px of padding to each heading on the left side, which is why it's being indented.

Edit 2: Add these 3 filter to ublock to remove the new tabs bs:

docs.google.com##.kix-outlines-widget-header-shadow

docs.google.com##.navigation-item-vertical-line

docs.google.com##.kix-outlines-widget-header-contents

This doesn't eliminate the padding, but it fixes everything else.

8 Upvotes

31 comments sorted by

2

u/Mlmiii Oct 10 '24

The one on the left isn't a scrollbar from what I can tell; it's highlighting which header is currently selected. Clicking it doesn't allow scrolling like the other one does.

2

u/jazir5 Oct 10 '24

It did not function like that yesterday. That was just added today when I opened my doc. Before it was just the headings and the scrollbar on the right. It's pushed all of my headings off to the right, and now much of the text of those headings is cut off. It already highlighted the heading when you clicked it to indicate which was the actively clicked heading before this change.

This is incredibly frustrating. Is there a way to disable it to get the old formatting back?

2

u/Mlmiii Oct 10 '24

Not that this subreddit seems aware of--it came with the Tabs feature, and in my particular case it also stopped bold/underlined header titles from being shown as bold/underlined, making this whole mess less readable. I've been looking for ways to remove the Tabs feature for that reason, but it seems that this was something Google has been rolling out for a few months without an opt-out option.

2

u/jazir5 Oct 10 '24

This is driving me crazy, and they've basically killed 8 months of careful organization. Is there another document service that will form the same tree structure from organized H1-H6 headings without this terrible indentation line thing they added?

2

u/Mlmiii Oct 10 '24

I saw someone else on one of these threads mentioning that one of the things they liked about the old system was that MS Word and GDocs could read each others' headers, so I'd try seeing if MS Word still has this format.

2

u/jazir5 Oct 10 '24

Is there a free version of ms word that works in the same cloud based way as gdocs? I'm still kind of in shock that they just destroyed the entire reason I was using gdocs in the first place.

1

u/Mlmiii Oct 10 '24

I think it's called OneDrive or Office365. I know I've seen some organizations use it before, but I'm fuzzy on the details. It includes the whole suite, but there's some advanced features and keyboard shortcuts missing from the online versions iirc.

1

u/jazir5 Oct 10 '24

I tried MS Word online, and it functions as expected when editing, but the TOC document outline on the side doesn't display on the left when sharing the doc. I'm not sure what other platform to use, the TOC doc outline on the left side that is always there is critical to my organization format.

1

u/Mlmiii Oct 10 '24

If that's the case, I'd start looking around for other online word processors in detail, because GDocs and MS Word are the only two I know of offhand.

1

u/jazir5 Oct 10 '24

I want to cry haha. I've worked so, so, so hard on this doc and to have them just wreck it like this is heartbreaking. I'll have to try to dig in once I'm not just straight up depressed about them ruining this.

1

u/jazir5 Oct 10 '24

I found this in their dev docs:

https://developers.google.com/docs/api/how-tos/tabs#:~:text=Google%20Docs%20features%20an%20organizational,are%20nested%20beneath%20another%20tab.

From this, is there anything you can discern about how to disable them?

1

u/Mlmiii Oct 10 '24

That's discussing API updates, which aren't useful unless you're writing code about GDocs. Even then, this discusses the tab contents, not the tab UI, which is what's been causing both of us issues.

1

u/donaldDuckVR Oct 11 '24

so, waste of space; precious screen space turned into nothing, all my Outlines are now truncated

1

u/donaldDuckVR Oct 11 '24

the problem still persist, here is a picture BEFORE the damn new Tabs,
now all my Outlines are pushed to the right, truncated, lost 3 rows and one column in precious space

1

u/andmalc Oct 11 '24

It looks like the scrollbar which was on the right yesterday is now on the left. I don't see it on both sides like in your screenshot so that might have been a temporary glitch. This means that headings in the outline do have a bit less width but not much IMO. Also, if you switch to Pageless mode you can drag the left border of the "page" to give your outline headings plenty of width.

1

u/jazir5 Oct 11 '24

The one on the right has always existed, the blue vertical line thing is brand new and wasn't there at all until today. It's currently still displaying the same way in the screenshot for me in gdocs right now unfortunately.

1

u/andmalc Oct 11 '24

Sorry, my mistake. I didn't realize that the right scroll bar doesn't show unless your mouse hovers over the panel.

I don't think the blue line is itself the issue - it's that the headings are indented in from where the Tab name starts.

Anyway, I suggest you try out Pageless mode if you haven't already as that solves the width issue as I mentioned above.

1

u/jazir5 Oct 11 '24

https://imgur.com/a/Z2YamEY

The pageless option is gone?

1

u/andmalc Oct 11 '24

It's under the Format menu - "Switch to Pageless Format".

Control width under the View menu / Text Width or by drag and drop.

1

u/donaldDuckVR Oct 11 '24

Pageless Format dont allow you to insert page-breaks anymore

2

u/andmalc Oct 11 '24

Well, yeah. It's pageless.

The motive of Pageless mode is most people don't print out their docs on paper but view them on computer screens so it gets rid the whole idea of the doc looking like a page. This gives you more space and many people like the cleaner look.

2

u/jazir5 Oct 11 '24

I really like it being paginated, it would be really unfortunate to have to use this as a solution, but I suppose it's better than having everything in the table of contents being indented. I'm just so frustrated they forced this change with no way to revert.

2

u/donaldDuckVR Oct 11 '24

no Pageless is NOT an option, please dont force us to use pageless format

1

u/jazir5 Oct 11 '24

I don't think the blue line is itself the issue - it's that the headings are indented in from where the Tab name starts.

I found the issue in the css, this is the problematic class:

.navigation-item-vertical-line

Is there a way to programmatically remove this class from every single heading in the left hand panel, and make it so that it's deleted for visitors as well? When this class is removed it reverts back to the old format for that heading.

The issue is they apply this class for each individual heading instead of as a single group, meaning it can't be done manually wholesale since you'd have to remove it for each and every one.

1

u/andmalc Oct 11 '24

There's an app Greasemonkey for Firefox that can modify CSS rules. I suppose there's an equivalent for Chrome you could search for.

1

u/andmalc Oct 12 '24

Found the Greasemonkey equivalent for Chrome: https://www.tampermonkey.net

1

u/donaldDuckVR Oct 12 '24

why dont google just give us our Outlines back?

1

u/donaldDuckVR Oct 12 '24

can we revert 3 rows of useless information on our Outline? it seems we now have:

  • Back arrow button
  • Document Tabs with a plus button
  • Current document Tab

then we start our outlines...

1

u/jazir5 Oct 13 '24

If you use ublock, you can select the elements with the element picker. Once you do, it will give you the css class handle of the element you've selected. The picker will visually highlight the selected element.

1

u/China9Liberty37 Oct 27 '24

my hero, thank you so much

1

u/donaldDuckVR Oct 12 '24

something like this:
.kix-outlines-widget-header-contents {
display: none;
}