This release is a modest one. With one sprint less than usual and many large projects on our plate, we have primarily spent our efforts doing preparatory work and making smaller improvements and bug fixes. But don’t fret, some serious new features and improvements are coming up!
Fonto Editor
We spent a good amount of time rewriting Find & Replace, which will be paired with significant performance improvements. The overhaul is not quite ready yet, but we will continue the efforts in 8.10, so you should be able to benefit from these improvements soon!
Fonto Review & Fonto Document History
In response to frequent requests, we have begun unifying Fonto Review and Fonto Document History. This effort will enable users to both view and create comments in the same view as seeing highlighted changes. Our goal is to enable reviewers to focus only on the most recent changes, as well as to provide more context on how a change or comment came to be. We’ll continue working on this in the next release.
Fonto Content Quality
The last i’s have been dotted for the Fonto Content Quality structure check widgets. In case you missed our previous release highlights, you can now configure quality suggestions on structural elements. This can be used for spotting missing semantics or highlighting content that does not adhere to directives. Check out how to configure them here.
Fonto Output
This release Fonto Output is launching its first public SDK together with Fonto IAP. The SDK includes a reduced set of Fonto Output features, but it makes configuration easier than ever. This rollout is the first step toward the fully featured public SDK we expect in the coming releases. Other keys to this release are improvements in performance and stability.
Fonto IAP (Integrated Authoring Platform)
Reuse policies
With the 8.9 release of Fonto IAP we’ve improved the way you can reuse components from different templates or documents. Components between similar documents or templates can be shared so both benefit from the made changes. If local changes are needed you can branch the component which will allow changes to be made for only that document or template. Additionally, we also show in which other places the component is used or branched from to help authors understand in which documents their change will have effect.
SDK 0.1
Fonto IAP now has a first 0.1 version of the SDK. This allows metadata fields to be added or removed and gives control over what can be used as a smartfield, condition, or should power your own data sources. Other configurations will allow additional output templates or data sources to be set up.
Manual repetitions
With this first version of repetitions, we enable authors and template designers to easily create more components which will lower the required effort for repetitive documents and reports.
Read more about the Fonto Integrated Authoring Platform.
Fonto research panel
Last release we introduced our new Research panel. With this panel, we are hoping to bridge the gap between us and our end users. Whether you’re a product owner, project manager, end-user, or user of other authoring platforms, we encourage you to sign up and take part in exciting research projects!
Coming up in a future release
For the next release, we intend to ship our Fonto Document History and Fonto Review integration. If you want to benefit from this union, you will need licenses for both, if you want to learn more, feel free to reach out!
Fonto IAP
For IAP, we’ll be working on a review of our REST APIs to improve their usability and make it easier to implement. As part of this we’ll also be updating our dashboard to be up to date with the API changes.
We’ll also be making some internal changes how document previews are generated which will simplify the internal process and should also speed up the pace at which previews will be shown.
And lastly we’ll be continuing our work on the SDK for IAP to improve it and resolve some of the issues which did not make it in the last release.
Want to experience Fonto 8.9 yourself? Give it a try!