Manula Changelog: What's New in the Manula software (Page 2)

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!

A nice tweak suggested by one of our clients (thank you, Caroline!)

“When navigating to a sub-topic via a link, can the parent topic auto-expand?

That is good one indeed. If you click on a topic link somewhere inside a topic’s body, it did now automatically expand the parent topic in the Table of Contents panel, making the new selected topic still invisible.

Auto-expanding the new topic’s parent(s) is a perfect enhancement indeed.
And today, we have implemented just that 🙂

Enjoy!

A quick fix for an old bug, reported by user Caroline:
The search box in the Video and Document Managers didn’t work, at all.

But now it does 🙂

Small fix today for a styling problem reported by one of our users (thanks Crest2208!).

In the live manuals, when enabling the Next/Previous topic links at the top, there was a weird extra empty space below the links.

Fixed now!

Today, a big improvement to the search engine for live manuals. Suggested by users for many years, but now finally available:
The ability to search for exact phrases using quotes, e.g. “code block” or “manual settings”.

An improvement for the “Link to Topic” screen, suggested by user Michael:

“In our guides it’s helpful to be able to search for specific page names when setting up new topic links. The only snag is multiple topics with the same or similar names.
Is there a way to show the ‘breadcrumbs’ so we can see where the pages are nested?”

Definitely makes senses, so here’s what we did:

When you enter the Link to Topic screen, it looks like this (nothing changed here):

In the Link to Topic screen, as soon as you start a search, the layout changes and includes the path/breadcrumb to the topic: