Apr 13, 2011 08:35 GMT  ·  By

Google Docs has introduced yet another feature that brings it one step closer to being on par with traditional desktop software, pagination for documents. This, obviously, enables users to break down their documents into pages, but it comes with a number of related benefits, as well.

Google also added support for native printing from Docs in Chrome, enabling users to print documents as they appear in Docs.

"We’re doing another first for web browsers by adding a classic word processing feature—pagination, the ability to see visual pages on your screen," Luiz Pereira, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.

"We’re also using pagination and some of Chrome’s capabilities to improve how printing works in Google Docs. Pagination is rolling out now and should be available to everyone by the end of the day," he added.

With pagination, you can now see exactly how long you have until you've finished your school report, for example. But the best part is that it makes document editing more suitable for printing since the layout will follow the physical one more closely.

With individual pages being displayed, the formatting is improved as well. For example, headers are displayed for every page, not just at the beginning of the document.

Page breaks now have a visual representation, since they really do move the text onto a new page. Footnotes are also displayed under the page where they appear rather than at the end of the document.

Pagination was made possible by the new documents editor introduced last year by Google. Since it doesn't rely on the browser to do the rendering and text processing, it can support more advanced features such as pagination.

You can switch between the current layout (compact) and the paginated view from the View menu.

Docs is also introducing a new and very interesting feature, support for native printing in Chrome. Printing from the browser until now meant converting the document into a PDF file and then printing that out.

With native printing, Docs gets to access the printer directly. This is only possible in Google Chrome for the moment, but Google is hoping other browsers will adopt the feature which has been implemented as a web standard.