A lot of cool new features, improvements, or even completely new products can be found in this release! This release sees updates to all six, that’s right SIX, of our products. That also means there is more to read than usual so let us keep it short in this section. One final remark, make sure not to miss out on our newly announced research panel.

Fonto Editor

Fonto Editor can now do automatic replacement of quote characters, sometimes called “smart quotes”. Use the new quoteStyle property to determine which characters to insert in your documents when an author types ‘ or “.

To stay up-to-date and enable access to new functionality, we’ve updated React to version 18.2.0. We’ve also updated Font Awesome to version 6.5.1. Enjoy the new icons!

Fonto Review

Fonto Review‘s apply change feature has become smarter in this release. The feature now tries to retain as much (inline) formatting as possible. That means that elements like bolds, references, and other inline elements are kept when they aren’t modified in the proposed text. 

Fonto Document History

Starting this release, Fonto Document History shows all documents in publication mode instead of just the one selected in the outline. This allows users to continuously scroll through the publication, similar to Fonto Editor and Fonto Review. The navigator in Fonto Document History is aligned with this, allowing easy navigation to just the changed documents.

Aside from that, the change visualization has been improved for documents that are present multiple times in the publication. These now show the correct change information accordingly.

Fonto Content Quality

Fonto Content Quality supports annotating element structures using the new registerFrontendXPathAnnotator API. This allows using the data already present in Fonto to drive Fonto Content Quality. Customers and partners can express soft validation rules with this system and detect for example invalid cross-references to elements that don’t exist (anymore) or invalid document content structures that can’t be enforced using XML schema.

Fonto Integrated Authoring Platform

Based on our newest platform we’re also, for the first time, releasing Fonto Integrated Authoring Platform as a new product. The authoring platform, IAP for short, is an all-in-one solution for businesses with special efficiency and reliability needs for regulated documents. With Fonto IAP, the process of creating documents is automated where possible, and collaborative authoring and review become much more efficient.

Amongst IAP’s features are:

• Template- and data-driven document instantiation. Think of a document that is generated from a template, but containing all the project settings, conditional content, and smart product data for this instance.
• Instantaneous and self-repairing synchronization with data and metadata coming from third-party systems, such as your product or taxonomy databases.
• Assisted quality control and workflow around releasing documents and templates, on top of Fonto Content Quality’s author-time suggestions.
• Maximize content reuse with conditional content and component reuse.
• Exports to formatted DOCX and PDF formats, including all of Fonto Output’s available features and true-to-life browser preview.
• Ultra-tight collaboration with teams of any size using comments, tasks, author guidances, author- and review assignees, automatic unlocking, document/template release notes, and more.
• An out-of-the-box dashboard to pull all this together, or the APIs to integrate with your existing task management system.

Fonto Output

Fonto Output has also received some updates in this release.

• The Public API is nearing design completion. We have worked hard on making it easy to use and aligning it with other Fonto products. Get in touch with us to study your specific use case!
• Fonto Output can now run on any server with any architecture, just as you can run the backend components of other Fonto products.
• Relevant changes to the Fonto Output engine, including performance improvements in content pagination, or table of content (ToC) visualization improvements, to name a few. All this makes the output documents look better and generate faster.

Fonto research panel

At Fonto we practice user-centric design. This means we always strive to keep the people interacting with our products at the heart of every problem. 

With our latest initiative to get closer to the real problems, we want to hear from more people with diverse backgrounds, skills, and perspectives. We are therefore launching a Research panel, which contains current end-users, customers, partners, users of other authoring platforms, and even potential customers. People who participate in the Research panel have the opportunity to take part in our exciting research projects to drive innovation forward. — It might be through a short survey, a one-on-one interview while interacting with a prototype, or a collaborative workshop. If you are interested, please Sign up and shape the future of structured content authoring!

Coming up in a future release

• Fonto’s Integrated Authoring Platform will be leveling up its reuse capabilities by introducing derived component reuse – reuse of an existing component, where all changes and deviations from its source are tracked. This includes comparison with the original source, the option to adopt updates to it, and even bringing derivative updates back into the source.
• Additionally, IAP will work hard to provide a public SDK with which its customers can self-service metadata customizations, connect additional data providers, and modify the output formatting of DOCX and PDF.
• In the next release, Fonto Output will continue working on its Public API, documentation and tooling. We will also collaborate with IAP to provide an SDK for configuring outputs, and we will improve the product’s performance and stability.
• Next release we’ll be working on creating Fonto Review annotations in Document History, allowing users to review documents with change markers. This should streamline review processes on changed documents significantly.

Want to experience Fonto 8.8 yourself? Give it a try!