On Wednesday, May 2, Google announced a set of exciting new features for its Google Docs suite, including the addition of a whopping 450 new fonts for creating pamphlets and personalized invitations. Other new features include additions to its application scripting language, which will allow developers to build interesting programs on top of the cloud service.

"In the past month we've made updates both big and small to Google Docs, and today we're announcing one more: web fonts in Google documents," the company wrote in a Wednesday blog post. "Often the best way to get your point across is to present your idea in a creative, captivating way. Today, we added over 450 new fonts to Google documents to make it easier for you to add a little something extra to whatever you create."

Fonts

Users can access new fonts by clicking on the font menu in Google docs, then selecting "add fonts." This will open a menu of all the Google Web fonts available, ranging from straightforward, business like fonts to playful and cartoonish ones. The added fonts are the same ones offered on Google's Web Fonts site for designers. Once you select a font, it will appear on the list of used fonts.

Templates

When it comes to templates, the 60 new additions are designed for work, school, home, fun, holiday, and much, much more. You can choose from a wide variety of templates, whether you need a resume, newsletter, legal invoice, photo sharing or something else.

In early 2010, Google introduced Google Apps Script, a scripting language for Google Docs, in order to allow users to automate certain tasks in spreadsheets. In addition, users could also tie third-party services to Google products via Apps Script, thus automating sending emails and posting dates on a Google calendar. Scripting gives Google an important edge in today's highly competitive tech world, as there are few other cloud services that provide this option.

Scripting Enhancements

With ScriptService, Google's latest edition to Apps Script, scripts can be published as a service program, and users have control over when scripts run via timers and other such events, enabling Google Docs to automate functions. Google Drive integration is another new feature of Apps Script. Also, the enhanced scripts now allow email attachments as large as 25MB, and docs of up to 50MB.

In addition to the font and scripting enhancements, Google also said its service will now allows users to import photos from Google Drive into Docs, and will also display bidirectional controls for users typing in right-to-left languages.

(reported by Alexandra Burlacu, edited by Dave Clark)