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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Google Docs Now Allows You To Insert Drawing

Google Docs team announced the new feature called Insert Drawing added to Google Docs. Now you can create and insert rich, colorful drawings into documents, presentations and spreadsheets, to illustrate your ideas or just for fun.

It's easy to create drawings using lines, free hand scribbles, text labels and a large choice of shapes that you can move, resize, rotate and adjust. Group, order, align and distribute and other features are available when you select objects you've drawn. You can also customize a range of shape properties, from line widths to fill color, and from arrowheads to font size, and much more. If you change your mind, there is undo and redo. You can collaborate with a friend or colleague on a drawing, or work alone, just as you can in Google Docs today.

To start creating drawings in Google Docs, open a document, presentation, or spreadsheet, and click Insert > Drawing. Then, select the type of object you'd like to insert from the toolbar.

Once you've created your drawing, click the X at the top right of the canvas to close the window and insert the drawing into your doc.

The team and technology behind Insert Drawing originally came from the startup Tonic Systems, which Google acquired in 2007. The drawing feature relies heavily on a relatively new capability in browsers: the ability to render vector graphics. Google uses the SVG (scalable vector graphics) standard to accomplish this in most browsers and VML (vector markup language) where SVG is not available.

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