Improved UI of Manage Variables screen, with 3 tabs:
Insert a Variable: for inserting a variable into your topic contents.
Manage Variable Values: for manage variable values at account, manual, version and language levels.
Create / Delete Variables: for defining new variables and removing existing ones.
November 18, 2013
New: Expand/Collapse Table of Contents entries in the Manual Editor.
November 15, 2013
Fixed: When a topic in the ToC had hidden subtopics only, its' expand/collapse arrow was still shown.
November 11, 2013
New: give users access to your Private Manual(s) using "Access Key" URLs.
Previously, the only way to give users access to your Private Manual was to create "Reader" users and let users log in using their own username and password. Now you can also give users a secret Access URL, containing a long secret "Access Key".
Use the "Private Manual Access" tab in Account Settings to create new Access Keys.
Define which manuals the Access Keys are valid for.
Provide a Name for each Key (just for internal use, to remember to which audience you gave that specific Key).
Then link to Private Manuals by adding a ?key=[accesskey] parameter to the manual URL (also work with deeplinks to topics)
The management of "Reader" users has now been moved to the new "Private Manual Access" tab.
The Users tab is now called "Agents" and is now only used to manage Admin and Author users.
November 8, 2013
Better and Faster PDF Generation:
Today, we switched to a different PDF generator library (Prince 9), which finally solves all PDF generation problems some users have been seeing (hangs on large or image-heavy manuals).
The Prince PDF generator is much faster (almost twice as fast), more stable and gives us more control on the styling of the generated PDF.
First tweaks to the styling:
Headers and footers are now printed in light grey, making them more "subtle".
Better looking Table of Contents.
November 6, 2013
Share/Copy: New option for topic Visibility: "Leave As Is", which copies or shares your topics with the same Visibility properties as in the source manual.
November 1, 2013
New: Quality Setting for YouTube videos. In the Video Manager, you can now set a Quality setting (Q: ...). Choose From:
Auto (default)
1080p
720p
480p
360p
October 30, 2013
New: Print button on the top right of your live manual topics. Your readers can use this Print button to create a clean print-out of the contents of the current topic, without the top bar and Table of Contents.
October 29, 2013
New: Custom CSS. Use the new Custom CSS tab in the Manual Settings for complete control over the look of your live manuals. Customize the style of any screen element by overriding our default CSS styles.
October 28, 2013
Better Bullets:
Un-ordered bullets: First, second and third level bullets now have a different look (filled bullets, open bullets, square bullets).
Ordered bullets: You can now opt to use "a, b, c, d ..." for numbering by setting the "abc" class on the first bullets, like so "#(abc) Bullet Text".
Fixed:
Account Home: Removing a manual didn't work in IE10.
Manual Editor: Removing a topic didn't work in IE10.
October 25, 2013
New: Invoices page that shows invoices for all your Manula payments in PDF format.
(choose Invoices from the Settings button top right)
October 23, 2013
New: Toggle All button in Share/Copy screen, to quickly select or deselect all topics.
Fixed: when Copying or Sharing multiple topics one go, their structure and order was lost.
October 15, 2013
New: Expand/Collapse Table of Contents entries in the live manuals.
New Manual Settings: Table of Contents Auto-Expand, for choose the default number of ToC levels that will be expanded when a user first visits your manual.
October 8, 2013
New Manual Setting: Allow user ratings on topics.
This lets you enable/disable the "Was this helpful? Yes/No" button at the bottom of your topics.
More Color Customization Settings:
Top Bar Color: Gradient or Flat
Top Bar Text Color
Link Color (now separate from Top Bar Color)
New Top Bar Customization Settings:
Show Company Name in Top Bar
Show Version Name in Top Bar
September 27, 2013
Manual Settings : moved all customization settings to new Customizing tab.
Live Manuals: remove "TABLE OF CONTENTS" text above ToC to give the ToC itself some more vertical space.
PDF: reduce the font size of page headers and footers, and removed their underlines.
September 26, 2013
New: Direct "View PDF" link right under the Update PDF button in the Manual Editor.
PDF: Tweaked the look of Topic Titles in generated PDF manuals.
September 24, 2013
Small tweaks to naming and effects of Topic Visibility options.
Now choose from: Visible / Hidden from ToC / Hidden:
Visible means: Visible everywhere, in ToC, in Search Results, etc... (default)
Hidden from ToC means : Visible, but only hidden from the Table of Contents.
Hidden means: Hidden everywhere, visiting the topic in the live manual will generate a 404 error. In generated PDFs, sub-topics of hidden topics will also be left out of the PDF.
New Account Settings for PDF generator: "Include a page-break before each subtopic" (default = ON).
When enabled, the PDF will only have a hard page break before top-level topics, not before lower-level topics.
August 26, 2013
New: Customizable size of the Topic Body box in the Manual Editor. At the bottom right, choose from:
Auto
: automatically resize the box based on the height of your browser window.
Fixed #lines
: Choose a nr of lines (between 5 and 60 lines) to keep the box at a fixed height.
New: the word "Manual" is not being added to your manual name anymore (at the top of live manuals), giving you more flexibility in naming your manuals. Some users like to use the word "Help" or "Handbook", etc... which they can now just add to their manual name.
August 23, 2013
New: Vimeo support. Now embed Vimeo videos in your manuals. Just use the Video Manager and choose the Vimeo option. (previously, only YouTube was supported)
New: enclose {variables} with @ characters to output them "as is", without Manula replacing the variable with a value, e.g. @{name}@.
August 21, 2013
Fixed: having the account level Default Language set to a language that was not available could cause problems in de manual editor.
August 19, 2013
Links to external websites now always open in a new window (target = _blank).
August 1, 2013
New: use the "?noNav=1" parameter when deep-linking to a topic to show the topic contents only. Without any navigation, no search bar, no ToC, etc...
This is useful when using Manula for showing context-sensitive help in a popup window.
July 23, 2013
Private manuals are now automatically hidden from the Company "hub" page.
Improved automatic generation of the Topic URL titles: It now maps foreign characters to their regular counterpart. For example, å and ö are now mapped to a and o.
July 3, 2013
Inserting YouTube videos:
It is now possible to independently set the width and height of the video box, so that you can adjust it for widescreen videos.
Embedded videos now automatically disable YouTube's "suggested videos" feature.
June 12, 2013
New Redirect option for users who show their manual on their own domain. This will automatically redirect the manual pages on the manula.com domain to the same pages on your domain with a permanent redirect.
In the Manual Settings, check the "Redirect manual..." checkbox.
Then enter the root URL of the manual on your own domain (without trailing backslash).
(This will also make your View Live buttons go the manual on your own domain)
June 4, 2013
Fixed: When selecting "Click for full size" on inserted images, the full size image popup always showed Next and Previous links, even when there was only one image.
May 29, 2013
Fixed: Rating and Comments in live manuals didn't work correctly on older versions of Internet Explorer.
May 27, 2013
Easier creation of sub-topics:
New "+" buttons when hovering over a topic title in the ToC let you create a sub-topic in the correct location in one go (without having to create it at the "wrong" level first, then having to drag it to the correct location).
Easier dragging and dropping of topics in the ToC:
You can now pick up and drag a topic in the ToC by clicking anywhere in the topic title
(previously one had to click and drag the small drag icon).
May 22, 2013
Re-design of Account Settings / Subscription page.
These search pages do still return a 404 (not found) error to search engine bots, so that removed pages are still removed from search engine indexes.
Better bot/spider detection for more accurate topic statistics.
April 8, 2013
New: Sign up and login with your Google account
April 3, 2013
New Account Setting: Hide Powered/Generated by Manula footers. (for paid accounts only).
Live manuals: "Download as PDF" button now opens the PDF version in a new window/tab.
PDF versions: Tweaked the look of the Table of Contents: no underlines, more vertical spacing.
March 29, 2013
Fixed: PDF Generator time-outs on large manuals.
March 27, 2013
PDF: Small cosmetic update to the cover page of the generated PDF manual.
Now includes product logo, version, company name and the "last update" date.
March 26, 2013
Fixes to live manuals and generated PDF versions:
The alignment of images within ol / li blocks didn't work correctly (in both live and PDF versions).
PDF: alignment of images didn't work at all in the PDF version.
PDF: customized colors didn't show up in generated PDF version.
PDF: generated PDF version did not use the full resolution of included images, causing some images to become blurry
Live manual pages now download and render slightly faster.
Further tweaks to the responsiveness of manual pages, that is, how the pages look and behave depending on the reader's screen size.
March 25, 2013
Editor: It is now possible to set alignments (Left, Center, Right) on "external" images too (images inserted directly from other websites).
Live manuals: the "responsiveness" of the live manuals has been tweaked to make the Table of Contents stay visible on narrower screens. For example, on the iPad in Portrait mode it now still show the ToC on the left side.
Fixed: the centering of images did not work in situations where the image was not surrounded by empty lines.
March 22, 2013
Account Home: clearer indication of Published vs Unpublished manuals.
Further improvements to the layout of the Settings screens.
March 19, 2013
New FREE subscription plan:
The 30-day trial has been replaced by a free, non-expiring, subscription plan that allows:
ONE Manual
ONE Author
A maximum of 20 topics
NO version management
NO localization support
BTW: while you're on the free plan, you can create multiple manuals, with multiple versions, in multiple languages, but you can only publish your first manual and version, in your default language.
This way you can try out all features of the paid plans before upgrading.
"Solo" subscription plan upgraded:
At the same time, the "Solo" subscription plan (US $9.95 / month) has been upgraded allow an unlimited number of topics, with full version management and localization support ( = multiple languages).
Re-design of Account Settings and Manual Settings screens:
Manual Settings: Improved screen layout, new color pickers for customizing your manual colors, better interface for managing Languages and Versions.
Account Settings: Easier to find (Settings button top right), new layout, color pickers, etc...
March 5, 2013
New: Sign up and login with your Facebook account
February 27, 2013
New in Topic Editor:
Embed YouTube videos in your topics.
Manage YouTube videos in the Video Manager and insert them into your topics as embedded videos, in your preferred size, aligned left, center or right.
New Settings:
Favicons can now also be set *per manual*, which will override the account icon (if any).
February 25, 2013
New Account Settings:
Account / Timezone: set your timezone to make Created and Modified dates show up in your own timezone.
Customize / Favicon: upload your own icon to be used as the browser "favicon".
February 22, 2013
New in Topic Editor:
Re-designed Editor toolbar.
New: insert dynamic links to Next or Previous topic (arrow buttons on toolbar).
These links will always automatically link to the next topic in the ToC, even after rearranging or renaming topics.
New: Generate Subtopic Bullets. This feature will generate and insert a bullet list with links to this topic's sub-topics, if any. Useful for "header topics".
Improvements to live manuals:
Small tweaks to line-spacing and letter-spacing, to improve readability.
February 20, 2013
New in app:
Editor / Images: When inserting images you can now choose the image alignment (Left, Center or Right), plus you can now choose to make the image clickable (to open a large version in a popup).
Editor: the "+ Add Topic" button (previously called "+ Create") and "Share / Copy" button have been moved above the TOC panel.
Fixed:
Info and Warning boxes didn't look right with one-line contents.
February 19, 2013
New in app:
Editor: new Zoom box for images, to open a large version of the images in a popup window. To use this, just add a "zoom" class to your images, e.g.:
!(zoom){IMAGE-LINK+manula-logo}!
(this feature will be added to the Insert command of the Image Library soon)
Editor: Warning when leaving a topic page without saving your changes first.
Improvements to live manuals:
Clicking the product logo about the TOC now takes you to the manual home.
Improved top bar for Manula accounts with just one manual.
Post Comments box is now "hidden" by default, it appears when clicking the "Post feedback" link.
Image Library: New red "Remove" button makes it clearer how to remove images.
(previously one needed to "hover" over the thumbnail to make a small "X" appear)
Editor: the manual-specific settings can now also be reached straight from the editor page, through a Properties button located under the Table of Contents.
Live manuals: all images now have some padding to the left and right, adding some extra white-space for readability.
Fixed:
TOC drag/drop: When dropping a topic an another topic, it was added as the first sub-topic. Now it's added at the end (which is more logical).
When selecting multiple-lines, then clicking the bullet button, only the first line was made into a bullet. Now it turns all lines into bullets.
Several problems when using Manula on IE9.
(we're still working on some remaining IE8-specific problems)
February 15, 2013
Editor:
New 'View Live' button on the top right, for easy access to your live online manual.
New 'Help' menu with links to the Changelog, Manual and Support page.
