Google Docs Writing Companion

This is an experiment to see if we can implement a Hemmingway App style prose linter as a Google Docs Add On.

The result: moderately successful.

There are a lot of limitations on what you can do within a Google Docs Add On. The most severe make it impossible to achieve a great user experience:

• It's impossible to respond to an edit event so this can never be real-time.
• It's tricky to highlight errors in the document without losing track of them and leaving the document a mess.

The current approach is therefore a sidebar with an analyze button.

This repo provides scaffolding to extract text from the document, run various analyzers and provide suggestions. Currently it's only using write-good but it's easy to add others.

How can I help?

Try this out. See if you want something like this. Think of ways to make this nicer. Open PRs. Personally I would like this as either a full real-time app like Hemmingway or as a bot that offers suggestions as other Google Docs users can.

Development

This is a bit complex and definitely a weird workflow as we're effectively deploying to Google Drive and then into Google Docs.

Create an app with api access in the Google API Console. Then create an .env file with the following

export GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=<your-client-id>
export GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=<your-client-secret>

Login to your app using Google oAuth to get a personal oAuth token to be able to deploy to Google Drive:

yarn deploy-token

This will open a oAuth flow in a browser and eventually save authentication tokens to .tokens.json.

Then you can deploy to Google Drive using

yarn deploy

After deploying you will see a new document (script) in your Google Drive called Writing Companion. If you open this document you can then publish on a single document by using Publish -> Test as add-on.

We've tried to keep most of the logic within the React App so for most part of the development you can simply do

yarn start

and enjoy all of the hot-reloading goodness instead of having to deploy to Google Drive on every change.

If this proves useful it would be cool to simply publish it as a Google Add On and skip the above mess.