Another improvement for the live online manuals, suggested by our loyal client Allyson, of SIOS Technology Corp.
When you click a topic link, from one topic to another, the Table of Contents on the left now auto-scrolls to make the new selected topic visible. The same now happens when using the Next / Previous Topic links at the top or bottom of your topics.
Enjoy!
In the past few weeks, we have been working on a major overhaul of the code that renders the live online manuals, to make them faster and to resolve the most commonly reported user interface annoyance.
These changes will make browsing the online manuals a much faster and more pleasant experience.
Basically, the main change here is that when clicking a link to a different topic (either from the Table of Contents of using a link inside topic contents), it does not do a full page re-load anymore. It now only loads the content of the new topic into the content panel on the right.
Because of this change, the ToC does not have to be 1. re-generated by our server and 2. downloaded to your browser, making the loading of the new topic much faster, especially for manuals with lots of topics. Another big advantage of this is change is that you don’t lose your place / scroll position in the ToC.
Up till now, the ToC panel has always been “locked” to the content panel, always scrolling together. With this overhaul, we finally resolved that common complaint.
The Table of Contents panel can now be scrolled independently of the topic content AND it retains its scroll position when navigating to a different topic!
Enjoy!
Another new feature today: Automatic numbering of your topics.
This was requested by user Tiana and I must admit: I was a bit hesitant about this one initially. I mean, Manula is all about interactive online manuals, so who needs numbered topics?
But then she explained:
“Well, we do a lot of phone support, and we often need to refer people to a manual topic for further info. And then it really helps if we can just say: look at chapter 3.3.2.”
Which makes a lot of sense 🙂 So we implemented it.
And now it’s live, I must say it is pretty cool. In fact, I suspect many users will switch this on.
Thank you Tiana for suggesting this!
The Auto-Number setting can be found in the Manual Settings screen, on the Customization tab:
Read more →
A cool improvement to the live manuals, suggested by one of our users (thanks, David!): the ability to temporarily hide and show the Table of Contents.
After hiding the Table of Contents, the actual topic contents takes up the full width the manual website, super handy on smaller screens.
To hide the Table of Contents, click the arrow button to the right of the ToC panel:
To make the Table of Contents appear again, click the arrow button that’s hovering on the left:
