Weird problem that sometimes popped up in some browsers:
When using special characters in topic titles, those titles did not display correctly in the browser tab when opening that topic in the live manual.
Found on Chrome, but was possibly also present in other browsers.
This bug has now been squashed!
Small fix for the online manuals:
When searching for phrases using double quotes, the search term did not show up correctly in the search box above the search results, showing
"my search phrase"
Instead of the correct
“my search phrase”
All online manuals created with Manula automatically remember the “state” of the Table of Contents (ToC). That is, if you expand a topic in the ToC, it will stay expanded.
Previous, this ToC state was remembered in a browser cookie. However, for big manuals with thousands of topics, this cookie could get quite large, even up to the point of causing problems with some servers (for integrated manuals).
So we have completely rewritten this ToC state saving system:
Our thanks go to Henriette of Dansk Golf Union for bringing this to our attention!
Tiny tweak to the live manuals, for SEO purposes: The HTML tag of live manuals now include the lang=”xx” attribute, indicating the language of that manual.
Manula was already supporting the inclusion of your own Google Analytics tags in your manual pages, so that you can track your manual visits in your own Analytics account. However, that still worked the “old-skool” way, by inserting your Google Analytics ID in the Manual Settings screen.
But.. as of today, we are also supporting the use of your Google Tag Manager ID. Which is required if you want to use Google Analytics 4.
Next to Youtube, Vimeo and Wistia, we have now added a fourth source to embed videos from : Microsoft Stream Video.
In the Video Manager, add videos from Microsoft Stream Video by entering their ID.
When inserting the video into your topics, it fully support the Autoplay and Start Timestamp options.
Please note that Microsoft Stream Video does not support Public videos. The videos, even when embedded in your manual, can only be accessed by users who are logged in to the same Microsoft business account.
This means that using Microsoft Stream videos is really only useful for internal manuals, to be used within your company.
The generated PDF versions of your manuals now use the full resolution of the images that you uploaded. This will improve the quality of the images in your PDFs.
(Previously, the generated PDFs used the scaled down versions of the images that the online manuals use, for size and performance reasons)
To enjoy the new image quality, you do need to re-generated your PDF version from the menu.
BTW: of course, using the full res images will increase the size of the PDF files!
As promised, we have just implemented further performance improvements for the live online manuals.
Rendered HTML versions of your topics are now cached on our servers, which means the topic content can be shown instantly. Browsing your online manual is now faster than ever!
The effect of these changes will be most noticeable on long topics with more complex layout.
Enjoy!
Some performance optimizations today. We were able to optimize the code that “renders” topics in your live online manuals, which has resulted in topics loading quite a bit faster. This is especially noticeable on long topics with a more complex layout.
Also, we changed the way the new topic loads when navigating to a different topic using the Table of Contents. Previously, the topic content area was blanked out while the new topic loaded, which caused a “flashing” behaviour. Now, the old topic content is greyed out a bit, with a nice loading animation. Makes it feel smoother and snappier too.
BTW: more performance optimizations for the live manuals are coming up early January 2021!
A common annoyance reported by our users, especially those with big manuals with a looonnnnggg Table of Contents:
“In the manual editor, when I click a topic that is far down the ToC, the page refresh and the ToC is scrolled back at the top again. Can you not make the ToC a separately scrollable panel”?”
Yes, we can! And we just did.
The Table of Contents panel is now a separately scrollable panel AND remembers its scroll position after a page refresh! This should make working on big manuals a lot more enjoyable.
A big Thank You! to all users who suggested this!
