Release 7.12

Release 7.12: Drinking our own champagne

This release we’ve been tackling some big projects that are going to greatly benefit both our internal workflow as well as our clients’. For starters, we’ve been working on our very own diff engine, which will replace the current engine in Fonto Document History. This new and improved diff engine makes comparing revisions a lot faster and paves the way for many more future performance improvements. Additionally, we’re able to detect changes at a higher level of detail, which means we’ll be rolling out many more change visualizations in the near future.

As our documentation is very precious to us, what platform better to trust to handle this content than our own Fonto Editor? Making this switch lays the groundwork for the new documentation site that we intend to release by the end of the year.

Out with the old, in with the new
Fonto’s API base is growing with every release. Most new APIs offer more features and better performance than the previous APIs. Hence why we already try to deprecate the old ones and convince you, our customers and partners, to move to the new APIs. 

To keep Fonto’s codebase maintainable, we want to sometimes remove certain old deprecated APIs. Every two releases we will remove certain APIs. This will be announced two releases in advance, which means that you will have 6 months to remove the deprecated APIs and switch to the new variant. We have set a hard limit at 2 days of effort for the upgrade of deprecated APIs. Of course we will offer you the guidance you need to smoothen this process. The 7.12 release announces these APIs as deprecated, which means that they will be removed in 7.14. Questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out.

Fonto Editor

The sidebar is now resizable
Whether you want to minimize distractions or want to fully focus on your sidebar’s contents, it is now up to our users to pick their ideal sidebar width. By introducing a draggable handle, users are now able to adjust the width of their sidebar at any time.

Automatically generated link titles 
You can now configure cross-references to automatically generate and update titles based on their reference. This will ensure your cross-references are always up-to-date and save you tons of time, which you can then spend playing around with our new resizable sidebar for example. Find more information on configuring this feature here.

Some more love for our tables
Working with large tables can be a drag on performance, thus we’ve worked tirelessly to drastically improve the performance of opening the context menu in (large) tables. We’ve also introduced a new type of table-flow-basic add-on that can be used for implementing table models that do not include the merging or splitting of cells.

Faster automatic numbering 
We’ve greatly improved the performance and stability for automatic numbering for e.g. tables, formulas, and sections.

Quicker and easier date input fields
We love keyboard shortcuts and we’re sure you do too. We’ve greatly improved the behavior of our date input field, users can now navigate their way around the input field using the arrow keys. We also split up the input field into dd/mm/yyyy for easier editing. Naturally, this is entirely localizable.

 

Fonto Document History

We’re very proud of the new and improved diff engine that we built ourselves. This allows us to not only compare different revisions of documents a helluva lot faster but also detect changes at a much higher level of detail. This opens up the possibility of adding many more change visualizations in the future as well as improve the performance even further. If you wish to upgrade to this version, please send a request through a support ticket.  

Fonto SDK

We’ve been working intensively on our new documentation portal, for which we’ll be using our own Editor. By making this switch, we’ll be in total control of the documentation process and are able to provide clients with much richer, better navigable content. On top of that, this allows us to experience our product quite literally through the eyes of the user, which will be very beneficial in our journey to continuously improve the user-friendliness of our products.

In the meantime, we have also completely rewritten the “Getting Started” page. This page will now guide you through the documentation portal either in the form of following some of our guides or by pointing you to the right page for a certain topic such as configuring your elements.

In our next release

During the next release, we’ll continue working on the publication side of our new documentation workflow. We’re right on schedule to launch the new documentation website and make it publicly available by the end of the year. 

We’ve also got some exciting product improvements coming up. As mentioned earlier, our new diff engine allows us to detect more changes. We figured we might as well reap the fruits of our labor right away and start with designing a visualization for attribute changes. Having these attribute changes visualized will tremendously help users in reviewing document revisions and keeping track of all the phases a document has gone through. 

We’ll also be working on a bunch of improvements for the outline. We received quite some requests and have made a selection that will greatly benefit many of our clients.

We expect to ship the upcoming 7.13 release on December 24. We’ll send out the release announcement with more details in the next few months. Stay tuned!


Please refer to your implementation partner for further information on how to acquire release 7.12 for your instance of Fonto. For more details on anything mentioned above, other new features, improvements and bug fixes, please read the release notes.

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