Last Updated on February 18, 2023
I’ve been using the same natively created Google Docs documents for well over a year, but in the last few weeks the formatting has smashed.
The document was created from scratch in Google Drive and is standard text with a few tables that have images inserted into them. When I create a new document I use the ‘make a copy…’ function, remove or type in text as needed and then download as a PDF. When I create documents in this way now some of the text will overlap with text on the line above or below it, and some images will ‘slip’ behind other images.
After much pulling around of documents to try and resolve the issue I threw my hands up and started again from scratch. I created an entirely new document using the standard Google Drive styles and sizes all inserted images in photoshop so they did not require any resizing in the Google Drive document. ALL text was either typed in manually or copied and pasted through notepad so I know that no dodgy formatting has been transferred over from previous sources. None of the images have any alignment / justification settings on them, I tried to fix the issue by setting alignment and it didn’t help. So even with a brand new document the problem still manifested itself.
Things I have tried to fix the problem of smashed image formatting in Google Drive
- Starting the document again from scratch
- Resizing the image so that it perfectly fits the table cell and doesn’t need removing
- Adjusting the table border size
- Adjusting cell spacing
- Putting different images in the cell to make sure I don’t have a damaged photo causing problems
- Manually sizing the columns
- NOT manually sizing the columns
- Using different photo quality settings when exporting from PhotoShop
- Moving tables using page breaks
- Setting alignment on images
- NOT setting alignment on images
- Drinking more coffee than usual
- Printing to PDF using Adobe Pro
- Downloading as PDF using Google Drive
- Changing font sizes
- Checking there are no erroneous carriage returns above, below or beside images
I really need to find a solution to this problem, if this can’t be fixed it’s a total deal breaker and we’ll have to stop using Google Drive entirely, which would be very frustrating because this appears to be a daft little bug.
Any ideas?
Update – 21/02/13
For now I have developed a work-around whereby I download the document in MS Word (docx format) and then open it in Microsoft Office, then print it to PDF. Using this method all images remain where they should be and no text overlays other text.
It’s a fairly crazy workaround, but does give further weight to the argument that the issue may lay with the Google Drive print/ pdf service.
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