The Google Workspace team have recently announced they will change how they render Google Docs.
"... migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms" - https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-Canvas-Based-Rendering-Update.html
This means GoogleDocsUtil will no longer work after this change to Google Docs.
When writing a Chrome Extension, in some cases you want to work with Google Docs. But working with Google Docs is not easy, it does not follow the normal way of interacting with homepages from a Chrome Extension.
This googleDocsUtil.js script is made to help interacting with a Google Docs document. It works as a Content Script and should be accessed from another of your Content Scripts.
- Get the text of the Google Docs document
- Get the caret index in the Google Docs document
- Get the current word at the caret
- Get the user selection in the Google Docs document
- Highlight from/to index in the Google Docs document
- Remove highlight
Please see for a fully working Chrome Extension which can get the text from a Google Doc page.
//contentScript.js
//Get the current state of the Google Docs document. After a change to the google docs document call the getGoogleDocument() again to get the changes.
var googleDocument = googleDocsUtil.getGoogleDocument();
//All the text is in the array googleDocument.text
//NOTICE: if the Google Docs document contains multiple pages, not all the pages may be loaded
var loadedText = "";
for(var i= 0; i < googleDocument.text.length; i++)
{
console.log("Text at line " + i + ": " + googleDocument.text[i]);
}
//The selected text
console.log("The selected text is: " + googleDocument.selectedText);
//Get the word at the caret
var currentWord = googleDocsUtil.getWordAtCaret(googleDocument);
console.log("The caret is at index: " + googleDocument.caret.index);
console.log("The caret is on line: " + googleDocument.caret.line);
console.log("The caret is at the index on line: " + googleDocument.caret.lineIndex);
console.log("The caret is at the word: " + currentWord);
//Gets the text from index 10 to 20
var foundText = googleDocsUtil.getText(10, 20, googleDocument);
//Higlights the index 10 to 20
googleDocsUtil.highlight(10, 20, googleDocument);
//Removes the highlight
//googleDocsUtil.removeHighlightNodes();
googleDocsUtil provides the following Interface:
function getGoogleDocument(); /* Returns a googleDocument object used below*/
function findWordAtCaret(googleDocument);
function getText(startIndex, endIndex, googleDocument);
function highlight(startIndex, endIndex, googleDocument);
function removeHighlightNodes();
function cleanDocumentText(text);
Desciption
The main call to get all the information about the Google Docs document.
Arguments
None
Returns
An element containing
{
text: [] /*An array of strings, each string is a line in the document. Means the number of strings is the number of lines in the document*/
selectedText /* Contains the selected text, if no text is selected it is an empty string */
caret: {
index /* index of the caret in the document */
lineIndex /* index of the caret on the current line */
line /*the line the caret is on*/
},
nodes: /* Google Docs have all its text in span elements of class "kix-wordhtmlgenerator-word-node", the nodes is a list of metadata about each node */
[{
index /* The start index of the node */
line /* The line the node is on*/
lineIndex /* The start index of the node on the line*/
node /* A reference to the "kix-wordhtmlgenerator-word-node" containing the actual text*/
lineElement /* A reference to the "kix-lineview" which contains the node element*/
text /* The text the node contains */
}]
}
Desciption
Returns the word the caret is at. If there is no word at the cursor, it will return an empty string.
Arguments
googleDocument: Returned from getGoogleDocument()
Returns
A string of the found word at the cursor
Desciption
Get the text within from the start index to end index
Arguments
startIndex: The start index in the text
endIndex: The end index in the text
googleDocument: The returned object from getGoogleDocument()
Returns
A string of the found text
Desciption
Creates an highlight starting at startIndex and ends at endIndex. If the text changes remove the highlight and set a new highlight
Arguments
startIndex: The start index in the text
endIndex: The end index in the text
googleDocument: Returned from getGoogleDocument()
Returns
void
Desciption Removes all highlights
Arguments
None
Returns
void
Desciption
If the text from the document is recived from elsewhere, you can use this method to clean the text of nonsensable characters.
Arguments
text: Text from the Google Docs document recived from elsewhere.
Returns
The text cleaned of \u200B and non breaking spaces.
It can only get the text of what is loaded in Google Docs. When you open a Google Docs document, Google Docs only load the text of first page. The rest of the text is not loaded before the user scrolls down.
- Get other peoples caret index in the same document
- Get other peoples selected text in the same document
Copyright (c) 2017 Dictus ApS
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