New Features
WYSIWYG
- Insert / Change image dialog was redesigned to provide faster and easier image replacement / selection. Now, it consists of a file manager displaying the latest used Storage folder, a thumbnail area which can be used to replace an image quickly and an additional options section (hidden by default). No extra clicks are now necessary to invoke the file manager or switch between uploading new images and picking existing ones.
- The editor now has the Tag Inspector tool, similar to the Inspect Element feature of modern web browsers to make HTML hierarchy handling easier. The Tag Inspector allows you to select elements, delete the selected element or remove containers thus “unwrapping” their content and moving the content to a higher level container. Also, it allows you to change a number of element properties like their ID property and CSS class name. The latter is particularly important when you need to assign CSS classes to container elements, which was not possible in the WYSIWYG mode previously.
- Word-like paste options were implemented. When you paste formatted content from MS Word or web pages, the content styles can be smoothly merged with the style of the current block. A toolbar appears in the top right corner of the editor, allowing you to choose one of the three paste options: Keep Source Formatting, Merge Formatting (the new default behaviour), Keep Plain Text (remove all formatting and paste the content as plain text).
- Improved YouTube video handling. A new Insert YouTube Video dialog was implemented. This dialog allows specifying various YouTube-specific settings along with some style settings, including the CSS class of the YouTube frame. Also YouTube videos are now represented with special placeholders in the topic content. You can now change the video settings via double-clicking the placeholders, invoking their settings from Tag Inspector or selecting the placeholders and clicking the relevant ribbon buttons.
- The Insert Video command now supports Screencast.com videos, in addition to Vimeo.
- You can now insert any Flash objects visually into your topics. Just like YouTube videos, the objects are represented with editable placeholders. You can specify some Flash-specific settings and control a number of style settings, including the CSS class.
- All CSS class selection combo boxes now support quick filtering. It’s now easier to find the class name by its part.
- The Refresh command has been renamed to Refresh CSS Styles and moved to the Styles group of the Home tab in the ribbon. Now, it is clear that you can use this command to reload styles after changing a project CSS file in another browser tab.
- The Full-Screen command has been moved from the View tab to the Home tab to make it easier to access it. Also, you can now use the F11 shortcut to switch to/from the Full-Screen mode in this view, just like in the Source view.
- You can now define custom colors in addition to the predefined color set and use the custom colors for text / background, table and image borders.
- Table styling is now much easier: when you insert a table in your document, a special CSS class is applied to it automatically and inline styles are no longer created for each cell. Thus, you can control styles for all your tables with a single CSS class.
Source Editor
- The source editor now uses a ribbon bar instead of a toolbar. In addition to the items specific to the Source editor, commands from the Review & History ribbon tab are now also available in the Source view. This makes workflow and history actions easier for those who prefer working in the Source view.
- The Auto Indent and Auto Format commands are now always enabled. If no text is selected when they are invoked, the commands are now applied to the entire topic source.
Preview
- This view now uses exactly the same engine as the regular topic viewer (except for links that still open in new tabs for the Preview mode). This means that topic styles in Preview are now precise as well and scripts now also work in this mode. Now you can, for example, expand/collapse Show More blocks in Preview, which was not possible previously.
- The View and Review & History ribbon tabs are now also available in the Preview mode. So, you can now easily switch the Full Screen mode and change output tags selected for preview right in the Preview mode.
Topic properties
- The “Back to topic” and “Help on this page…” links have been moved to a new line at the top to make them easier to notice. Also, the “Back to topic” link is now at the left part of the header, so it’s easier to access it.
Conditional Content
- IMPORTANT: default befaviour change. Conditional content blocks handling logic changed in help topics for cases when you do not specify an output tag when publishing. Previously, all conditional content remained in the output. Now, include blocks are removed (as “None” is not a tag for which the content should be included) and exclude blocks remain in the output like before (as “None” is not a tag for which the content should be excluded). This affects both output tags preview and project publishing logic.
- It is now possible to specify multiple output tags when creating a publication. This is useful for cases when you use output tags for several purposes (say, for multi-language translations, printed/online output, content specific for some editions of your application, user / admin manuals, etc.).
Review Notes
- Review Notes editor has been redesigned. Now, you can invoke it with a new “Notes” button located next to the Properties button in the topic editor (it is no longer available in topic properties). The Review Notes editor is displayed instead left navigation panel (TOC, Index), so you can view / edit the topic and write some notes at the same time.
- The Review Notes editor now has a more lightweight UI which makes handling topics with a lot of comments easier.
- Comments can now be marked as read / unread. The status is tracked for every user separately. The number of unread comments for a topic is displayed in the Notes button caption. Also, you can mark all comments as read with a single click if necessary.
- You can now edit / delete only your own notes, not the notes added by other users. If you need to mark some note as handled, just mark it as read.
Branding
- All editors of special pages (Portal Home Page, 404 Not Found pages, etc.) now have the branding style file applied to their Preview and WYSIWYG views to provide precise content preview. Also, the branding script file is now applied to the Preview view.
- Portal home page settings are no longer considered to be advanced, they are visible by default in Global Settings.
Web Help
- Web Help UI redesigned to become more modern and lightweight.
- Web Help now includes a simplified version of topic header which contains the currently viewed topic’s title and social sharing buttons (if they’re supposed to be displayed according to project properties). This web, Web Help looks much like the online portal.
- The Index tab is no longer displayed in Web Help if no index keywords are defined for the exported publication.
Import – General
- Import wizard UI has been simplified – the files upload step.
- Imported manuals upload improved: now, dropped / uploaded file extensions are validated to match the selected import format to avoid import errors on further steps due to unexpected file format.
- Imported manuals upload improved: now, the upload is performed asynchronously, so the GUI no longer blocks while a big file is uploaded.
- Following customer requests, maximum allowed size of imported manual has been increased: now, it’s 200 Mb (was 100 Mb before).
MS Word Import
- Smarter markup optimization: now, you will no longer get unexpected extra vertical space in tables imported from Word documents in the “Optimize styles” mode.
- Smarter markup optimization: all inline styles defined via the style attribute in markup are now optimized in the same way as it was done for the generated CSS file.
- Smarter markup optimization: all styles are now removed from headings, lists and list items to prevent unexpected indentation, spacing and other style issues and provide smooth integration of the imported content with heading / list styles defined for your project.
- Smarter markup optimization: numbered headings are now processed differently: the heading numbers are now removed, so you no longer get values like “1. Topic Title” in the TOC, topic titles, topic URLs and topic content. You can still enable heading auto-numbering during export if you need it, though – ClickHelp will do the automatic numbering for you.
- Smarter markup optimization: span and p elements in list items are now removed when they are not necessary to simplify the markup and make it easier to manage.
- Smarter markup optimization: empty divs are now removed from the generated HTML markup, as well as span elements which do not have any properties.
- Word Import now uses pixels for font sizes, which is more natural for CSS than using “pt”.
File Manager
- The Open / Save dialogs across the entire application no longer display the folders tree on the left. The tree only remains for the File Manager dialog. Instead, folders are rendered as separate selectable elements, along with the files.
- You can now upload files to the currently opened file manager folder via drag&drop.
- All file manager dialogs now display more information on files near their thumbnails: last modification date and file size.
- All file manager dialogs in the application now have a breadcrumb that displays the current path and allows easy navigation to parent folders.
- All file/folder selection dialogs can now be maximized to provide easier navigation for folders with a lot of files.
User Profile
- Avatar images are now displayed for users everywhere in the application – version history, topic editor, workflow notification emails, user selector in publication security settings, etc.
- Gravatar support implemented: if a user has no avatar image specified in their ClickHelp user profile, the Gravatar avatar is used instead. If no Gravatar account exists for the user, an avatar image is generated for the user automatically on the Gravatar side.
General UI Improvements
- The entire ClickHelp UI has been updated to have a more lightweight and modern design. We hope you will like it!
- Added the “Open…” command to the Current Project submenu. Now, you can easily open the current project’s topics from any page which is aware of the currently selected project (for example, the Projects or Project Settings pages).
- Easier navigation to other projects in your portal. The Current Project menu now have links to other projects so you can easily switch among them from any ClickHelp page.
- Added the “ClickHelp Videos” item to the Help dropdown menu on the master page. We work to create short demo videos of various prodcut features, so you can easier learn the product.
- The “Your Trial” main menu item now reports the number of days remaining for trial users.
- The application header has been redesigned to have a more modern look: the profile link has been replaced with a user profile image, dropdown arrows are not visible until elements are hovered.
Printed Output
- IMPORTANT: default behaviour change. We have implemented the smart heading handling for the printed output. No more duplicated headings! If you choose to auto-generate headings from topic titles (which is the default setting) and have the title text typed with the Title (Heading 1) style in the topic content (which is common for all our project templates and the majority of imported manuals), the printed output will have only one title line – the auto-generated title.
- If you choose not to generate headings from topic titles, TOC is now generated from the headings in your topic content. The “heading text” for a topic is determined as the first paragraph with non-empty text and the Title (Heading 1) style. If the first paragragraph with non-empty text has a different style, the topic is considered to have no heading text.
- Better table sizing algorithm is now used to make sure that all tables will fit the page width. Tables with the width defined in percents (like in the Start Page topic from the project templates) will not be stretched vertically.
- A better image scaling algorithm is now applied to make sure all complex cases are handled and factors like left / right paddings are considered when auto-scaling images to fit the page.
- PDF: exported images now have better quality and the overall document size is smaller for the PDF output, because the exported images are no longer converted to JPEG.
Version History
- The versions list now displays more clear information on the topic editing sequence. The initial version of a topic is marked with a special label and no separate “Started editing…” records are created when a topic is locked. Instead, the current lock date/time is added to the label of the Current Version element.
- The “Current version” entry now contains information on the latest changes made to the topic, including the author, editing session duration and timestamp. For the locked topics, it identifies the user who locked the topic and shows the lock date / time.
- The Compare versions page now displays information on specific differences between the two versions being compared: whether the versions are identical, different in some formatting or have some words added / removed.
Projects Page
- All project nodes are now expanded by default on the Projects page.
- Projects can now be opened with a double-click.
Other
- Easier image editing: a number of application setting (like the Login page background image, favicon, logo and other branding settings) now use a new image selector control. It makes it easy to select images both from Storage and from your computer, supports image preview, drag-n-drop, upload progress display and other nice features.
- Search results navigation on the Search page was redesigned to provide better user experience.
- Faster dialogs: all dialogs in the application now handle the Enter keystroke. Like in all usual dialogs, the keystroke invokes the default action – OK, Yes or Next (for wizards) command.
- Faster topics creation: now, when you open the New Topic dialog, the topic title box is focused automatically and the entire title value is selected by default. When you start typing a title, the default value is replaced.
- The Buy More Licenses link on the Authors management page has been converted to a button to make it easier to notice.
- The Full Text Search indexing performance has been improved to better handle big projects with thousands of topics.
Fixed Issues
Topic Editor
- If you switch to topic properties while editing the topic, change the topic title, save the changes and then try to make and save changes to the topic content, you will no longer see unexpected message saying the topic has been modified and the editor will not jump out of the editing mode.
- When you click the topic title to change it, the relevant editor is now focused and its text is selected in topic properties after the properties page is refreshed (the text was selected and then unselected previously).
- When you change a topic title and get back to viewing / editing a topic from the Properties screen, the page title and topic title in the header panel is now refreshed (was displaying the old title previously).
- Leading / trailing whitespaces are no longer present in the Text field of the Change Link dialog when editing an existing link whose text includes such whitespaces.
- The “target” attribute is no longer added to image nodes in topics.
- The “Start from new page” option in the “Printed Output” section of topic properties is now enabled by default to reflect the true default value of this option. Previously, it was displayed as disabled by default, which was not true.
- When you focus the topic editor and press Enter in it for the first time in Chrome, the caret no longer jumps to the beginning of the next paragraph. Instead, a new paragraph is created as expected.
- Space key presses now enable the Undo ribbon item. Prevously, they did not lead to Undo enabling.
- If you switch to the Source view, then get back to WYSIWYG or Preview and try to log out, the log out action now completes correctly (was not working before).
MS Word Import
- In some cases, heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) generated from the imported document were not closed correctly so the heading tags wrapped several paragraphs of text.
- Heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) no longer wrapped in <a> tags. Therefore the link hover style is no longer applied to them if you have the style defined in your project.
- CSS class names are no longer removed from elements in the “Keep precise styles” import mode.
- Fixed an issue with list item styles: previously, the Windings font was used for the list item text when a custom symbol was used for list bullet in MS Word. As a result, the list item text became unreadable (Windings symbols were displayed instead of characters).
- Fixed an issue with list item styles: previously, some list items were displayed with incorrect color, font or font size, because the list item bullet / number styles were used for list item text as well.
- Fixed an issue when text in imported images became unreadable due to resizing / compression problems.
- Fixed an error which occurred when uploading large Word documents to the Import wizard when the upload takes long (a browser alert window appears in this case saying “Upload failed. Server response code: undefined, undefined”).
- Some Word files could be uploaded as corrupted when using Firefox.
- Anchors are now converted to <a id=…> tags, which conforms to the HTML5 standard (previously, they were converted to <a name=…> tags).
- Unordered lists are now imported correctly. Previously, they were imported as ordered lists in some cases.
Web Help
- Header logo was not displayed in some versions of Firefox.
- Titles are now set correctly when navigating among topics (were not initialized before).
- The “Unexpected string” JavaScript error no longer occurs when switching to a topic whose title contains double quotes. This error led to the page title not being updated when switching to such topics.
- Web Help export no longer crashes if you have custom TOC node icons defined for some topics.
- YouTube videos are now displayed in Web Help properly when opened from the local file system.
Context Help
- If there are several Context Help elements embedded on the same page (say, a popup and an assitant panel), the popup height is now auto-sized correctly.
- If you have a context help popup which displays a long topic and the popup is set to auto-adjust its height, the popup size is now calculated correctly so the popup window always fits in the visible area of the browser window.
Other Bug Fixes
- Projects having characters from different encodings not matching the project’s language setting (e.g. a mixture of English and German content) are now exported to HTML and printed formats correctly.
- Subitems from the Current Project main menu item are no longer available when no project is open on the Projects page (for example, for new portals which don’t have any projects created yet).
- URLs with hash fragments are now handled correctly when importing TOC and Keywords Index data from CHM files.
- The View and Compare version history commands now work correctly for topics having the zero character in their URLs.
- The topic content and TOC could not be loaded if AddThis is blocked in the reader’s network.