It’s finally here! After tirelessly working on our new documentation portal, we’re very excited to announce that its website has launched. The new website contains all the articles from before, except it’s much faster, more structured, easier to search and quicker to navigate. Click here to visit.
We’ve also showered our Outline with love this release, which has resulted in a fancy new feature set including an “expand/collapse all” option, a filtering functionality, and new configurations to help users quickly see the status of their document.
Fonto Editor
Configurable status badges
We’ve introduced status badges on Outline items. These badges can be configured for just about anything related to your workflow: think of a badge to alert the author of a topic that requires review, or a badge to indicate that a topic needs to be translated. Adding badges to your Outline items helps authors recognize what needs their attention.
Outline filtering
By using the filtering functionality added to the Outline, you’re now able to organize your Outline based on a text search or status badge. If you’ve configured status badges for topics that need to be reviewed, users can filter on these topics, providing them with a clear scope of work.
Expand/Collapse functionality
In order to make it easier to navigate large publications with a lot of nested documents or sections, we’ve introduced the “expand/collapse all” functionality. You’ll be able to find our new expand/collapse options in all out-of-the-box sidebars that use grouped listings, such as the Outline, Find & Replace, and Fonto Review.
Clearer document states
To minimize the amount of hindrance to an author when collaborating with other users, we made various improvements to the document state visualizations. The design was updated to more clearly communicate the document status in the CMS, and provide users with better guidance. We’ve also introduced document state icons to the Outline to show which documents are locked by you, out-of-sync, or in an error state.
Improve performance by collapsing tables
Having a lot of large tables can take a toll on performance, so we’ve added a configuration option that lets you (auto-)collapse large tables. This way, a table will only be rendered once a user expands it, drastically improving the startup time. To read more about how to enable this configuration, see our documentation.
Lazy Query Widgets
We have refactored Label Query widgets to delay their computation until they are scrolled into view. This specifically improves the performance of configurations where labels are based on expensive XPath functions.
XPath Profiling
We’ve introduced additional tools to profile the performance of specific XPath queries. XPath queries are used throughout Fonto’s most powerful configurations and can improve performance if used correctly. The new profiling tools will help immensely! Read more about optimizing XPath queries.
Fonto Document History
Visualization for attribute changes
In the last release, we introduced our new and improved diff engine to you. This release we implemented a new feature for Document History — visualizing attribute changes! If an author makes an attribute change, this now shows up as a card in the document history view you’re familiar with. This makes the audit trail more complete and will prevent important changes from going unnoticed.
Fonto SDK
We’re very excited to share with you that our improved documentation website has been launched. We picked up this project after receiving quite some feedback from our partners and customers on our old documentation website, and using this input we redesigned the website focusing entirely on usability. We’re editing the new documentation with our own Fonto Editor, and we’re putting some of DITA’s features to use to improve content and reuse.
One of our main focuses of the new documentation site was to improve the navigation within the website so it’s easier for you to find the content you need. On top of that, the loading time of the website has improved drastically. We really value your feedback, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re missing any information or if you just want to give us a pat on the back.
In our next release
Exciting things ahead! During the next release we’ll be giving Content Quality a makeover, which will greatly improve the user experience. Additionally, Content Quality will now work seamlessly with editors that do not load all documents at once (JIT-loading).
Besides the Content Quality improvements, we’ve also set aside quite some time to improve the user experience of all of our products as well as the partner experience. We’ve received a lot of feedback from you, which we’ll be responding to with improvements where we can. We’ve also created a new team whose focus will be to refine and bring new features to our Editor.
Last but not least, we’ll be working on an API to invalidate custom XPath functions. This will allow almost anything in Fonto Editor to update when any external state changes, such as a CMS workflow, metadata, or anything else that you can observe.
We expect to ship the upcoming 7.14 release on April 1, 2021. 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 7.13 for your instance of Fonto. For more details on anything mentioned above, other new features, improvements, and bug fixes, please read the release notes.