A new version of Google Docs is now available. With a slightly different interface, developed around user input, it is for the most part the same. A ruler is now available at the top of new Google Documents allowing you to better control margins (for paragraph or whole document) and more-precise indentation control. Spell check is also now more “built-in” with a red-underline instead of highlighting incorrectly spelled words with yellow. Individual paragraph spacing is also available so that spacing does not apply to the entire document.

A few new features for collaborators has also been introduced, I suspect these coincide with the success (or, what they call success..) of the Wave Protocol. Real-time editing is now available, instead of getting incremental updates to documents whenever you save. Chat has also been added, now no longer requiring you to use separate programs or dedicate space in your document for conversations.

Importing has also been improved, allowing better quality uploads from other formats.

To check out the new features, login to Google Docs and click Settings > Document Settings, click on the “Editing” tab, and check “Create new text documents using the latest version of the document editor”.

Information directly from Google is available about this right here: https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=176442

Google Says

“These features from the previous version of Google documents, however, won’t be available in the new version:

• Offline document access via Google Gears
• Edit HTML
• Edit CSS “

Also, Default Document Styles are not yet available.