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...

  Few things are more frustrating in Google Workspace automation than watching your carefully crafted template break during execution. You set up a perfect legal contract or invoice template with bold headers, specific fonts, and indented bullet points. You use the standard   replaceAllText   request. The result? The text updates, but the formatting vanishes. Bold placeholders become plain text, or worse, bullet points collapse into a single unreadable paragraph. While  replaceAllText  is the convenient route, it is a blunt instrument. It lacks the nuance to respect the underlying  textRun  architecture of the Google Docs JSON model. To maintain strict control over typography and list hierarchies, developers must abandon the convenience method in favor of scanning the document structure and executing precise  batchUpdate  operations. The Root Cause: How Google Docs "Sees" Text To understand why styles disappear, you must understand the Google...