Manula software updates related to "toc"

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:

• The total size of the saved data is now much smaller
• It now use local browser storage instead of cookies, which is faster too.

Our thanks go to Henriette of Dansk Golf Union for bringing this to our attention!

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!

By opening a topic with ?noNav=1 added to the topic URL, you can open a topic without the Table of Content or the top bar showing. Giving you only the topic content, no navigation whatsoever.
Many Manula users are using this to show content sensitive help in a browser frame within their application.

However, there was one “little” annoyance with this trick. Once the user clicked a link to another topic, the noNav state was lost and the next topic *would* show the top bar and ToC.

So, we fixed that now. As soon as a topic is opened with the ?noNav=1 parameter, that noNav state will be remembered in a local browser cookie, so that the user stays in this state until he/she closes the browser.
(the noNav cookies is a session cookie).

We hope that this make the noNav param even more useful.

Two small optimizations to the live manuals today:

• When you select a topic in the Table of Contents, it is always automatically “expanded” to show its’ subtopics.
• The clickable (tappable) area of the expand/collapse icons (chevrons) is now slightly larger, making them easier to touch on mobile touch screen devices.

Thanks to Mark from Pyware, for suggestion this tweak!

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:

Today we’ve implemented several improvements to the look and feel of your online manuals when viewed on small screen mobile devices.

• The Table of Contents that appears after clicking the button in the top bar now also supports the expanding and collapsing of topics, just like the normal ToC that appears in the sidebar on larger screens.
• The layout of the top bar has been improved (the navigation bar that contains the company logo and name, manual name, language selector, search bar and ToC button).

An example top bar of the live manual by one of our clients: