Programming Tutorials

  Building integrations for Google Docs often starts with a simple premise: "I want to highlight a specific phrase," or "I need to anchor a comment to this generated paragraph." In the Google Docs UI, this is trivial. You highlight with your mouse, and the DOM handles the rest. However, when working with the  Google Docs REST API , you hit a distinct barrier. There is no  anchorTo("text")  method. Instead, the API relies exclusively on absolute  startIndex  and  endIndex  integers. If you attempt to perform simple string matching on the document body, your integration will break. Structural elements (tables, images), styling changes (bold/italic splits), and Unicode characters create a divergence between the  visible text length  and the  internal API index . This post details the architectural implementation required to reliably calculate text anchors for the Google Docs API, bypassing these indexing limitations. The Root Cause: Li...