Collapsing Elements in a Google Doc With Google Apps Script - Is This Possible?

Solution 1:

You cannot do anything special in Apps Script, just automate stuff that you can do manually.

So, there's no way to do real collapsing, since there's no such feature in Google Docs. But you can use available functionality in unorthodox ways and make it work for you. For example, you could save the content somewhere else (maybe another document), so you can remove and add "sections" making it look like collapsing. This would have the downside of polluting the document revision history a lot, since every collapse event will be treated as changes to the document. Or you could export the document as HTML, maybe host it on Drive itself and implement the collapsing there, using javascript, then just serve the link to the user.

Anyway, this is just a couple of ideas that recklessly throwing here, which may or may not work for you. But none of will ever be real collapsing on a Google Doc.

Solution 2:

As an alternative, we used the outline feature, so we can jump up and down a document quickly:

• First open the Outline tool from the menu: View -> Show document outline

• If you want to reach a part of your document easily, select some text at that point and give it a heading: Hit the part of the toolbar that says "Normal Text" and change it to "Heading 5".

• Remove any headings that you don't want from the Outline by hitting the X next to them.