New Features
Breaking Changes
- Internet Explorer 11 support in ClickHelp is now deprecated. We will still accept issue reports specific to IE11 support, but this browser is now excluded from our testing process. Support for IE11 in ClickHelp will be discontinued in 12 months after the Rainbow update.
Translation Management
- ClickHelp Rainbow adds extended support for multi-language documentation site creation. This includes UI localization and translation workflow support. Authors can now provide different content for any number of languages with minimal effort.
- Multi-language content maintenance has been made easier. When you make a change to the base language version, all translations are automatically updated to reflect that change and let you translate only the added or modified parts.
- Home page content, portal settings, menu items text, variables (e.g., phone number, company address, email address, etc.), index keywords, and other data contributing to reader experience can also be localized through a single unified UI.
- New user role added: Translator. Translator users have limited permissions, can only access translation projects by default, and work with a simplified UI to make ClickHelp adoption easier for them. The role is a perfect fit both for third-party contractors and for in-house translators that contribute to your projects’ translation or review your translations.
- New project type implemented: translation projects. Such projects are displayed as language versions of the base project. Translation project content is automatically synced with the base project content to make the translation maintenance easier. The topic editor UI is different for translation projects to give translators an easier interface to work on the text unit basis.
- Automatic topic status tracking has been added for translation projects. Changing a topic status in the base project will trigger the needed status changes in all translations. This helps translators easier identify the topics that are ready for translation and which topics are still being worked on in the base project.
- New TOC filters implemented for translation projects.
- Automatic language detection implemented for readers.
- Readers can select their preferred UI language explicitly and switch between translations of the same topic easily.
- ClickHelp Reader UI now comes with ready translations into a number of languages out of the box: German, Spanish, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Hindi, Chinese. More UI translations are coming in the future – send us your preferences, so we can prioritize this work accordingly.
- Email notification templates can now be translated to any language.
Translation Editor
- ClickHelp now comes with a CAT-like translation editor, which can be used to translate topics, portal Home page, portal settings, etc., in a single unified UI.
- Live preview for translated content, so you can see the result right away.
- Viewport sync between translation editor and preview – just click a sentence in the preview to open it for editing or click a translation unit to see it in the preview.
- Two-column translation editor with customizable layout and the capability to hide translation unit info when you don’t need it.
- Screenshots localization implemented. Localized versions can be added to the editor via drag-n-drop or uploaded directly to the File Manager.
- Document translation progress bar, with details by translation unit statuses and base language word count.
- There are shortcuts for typical operations to improve translation productivity.
- Visual indicators for formatting tags which can be easily added to the translation text via both mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts.
- Automatic tag order correction when copying/pasting/adding tag placeholders.
- Automatic tags validation (missing tags and orphaned tags detection), with a way to fix the issues quickly.
- Colored translation unit status indicator, which allows you to find changed parts easily.
- Translation length counter with warnings on too long/too short translations.
Dashboards
- Added a new dashboard type: Translator Dashboard. The new dashboard is designed to manage translation projects and translations of global entities like the Home page, portal settings, variable values, etc.
- The dashboard comes with a number of predefined views which can be useful for different roles and usage scenarios.
- Translations can be filtered by projects and languages.
- Overall progress is displayed for translations matching the current filter, with details on translation statuses.
- It is easy to see the translation status and progress by document or by group.
- Base language word count can be obtained for each group and each document.
- The translations table provides all the standard features available for other similar tables in ClickHelp: filtering, grouping, sorting, and so on.
- It is possible to add/remove columns displayed in the translations table.
- Portal Dashboard renamed to Author Dashboard.
- Author Dashboard UI simplified to make it cleaner and more compact.
- New and updated projects or publications are now highlighted on the dashboard when a wizard closes. This helps you notice the changed elements easier.
- It is now possible to filter projects and publications on the Author Dashboard easily with a quick filter.
- Author Dashboard is now available to Authors, Reviewers, and Translators.
- Reviewer Dashboard is now available to Authors, Reviewers, and Translators.
- It is now possible to create projects and publications with non-unique names. For example, you can now have multiple publications of the same project named “MyProduct 1.0” in different languages.
Topic Editor
- Added support for the “check as you type” spell checker feature. You can now use your favorite browser spell checker when creating content.
- Tabbed content implemented. You can now add tab controls to your topics to provide different versions of content in a single topic – different code samples for different programming languages or different steps for different operating systems and environments.
- Added new quick parts for API Documentation projects. All quick parts are fully customizable to match your authoring needs and brand identity:
- Member Table, including Required/Optional parameter indicators.
- HTTP Request: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, including request URL and request type indicators.
- Response Codes block, including colored response severity indicators (OK/warning/error).
- Request Sample.
- Response Sample.
- New layout type implemented for code samples: Compact. This layout type allows you to render code samples as regular highlighted text without the code box header and background styles. This is especially useful when embedding a code sample in tabs for multi-language code samples.
- Topic loading time significantly improved both for authors and readers.
- A new row is now added to the current table when pressing Tab in the last cell.
- The number of items displayed in the topic selector dropdown in the Insert Link dialog has been increased to 10. It is now also possible to load all matches if the top 10 matches are not enough.
- A warning box is now displayed when you’re trying to overwrite an existing Quick Part (an information box was displayed previously).
- The “Insert Flash” command has been removed from the Insert tab of the editor ribbon bar since the technology is now obsolete. Editing of existing Flash objects embedded in topics is still available. Also, new objects can still be inserted via the “Custom HTML” command.
- Authors can now switch between different languages of the same project easily: the project name is now a combo box.
- Types of nested ordered/unordered lists in content now vary depending on nesting level. New styles added to allow changing list type easily.
Branding
- The portal Home page, “Project not Found”, and “Article not Found” pages now have Draft and Published versions. This means that you can safely work on new versions of branded pages without affecting the current published versions displayed to your readers. This is particularly useful when working on live portal rebranding.
- New Reader UI settings implemented:
- Show publications list (Clear Sky template only)
- Mini-TOC: max heading level
- See Also: include sibling topics
- See Also: include child topics
- Breadcrumbs: include Home in path
- Breadcrumbs: include publication in path
- Breadcrumbs: include current topic in path
- Breadcrumbs: separator markup
- Email notification templates can now be customized. Template files are now regular .html files in your ClickHelp Storage.
- It is now possible to make the header logo non-clickable.
- It is now possible to control TOC nodes click behavior for readers with the new “Expand/collapse nodes on caption click” Reader UI setting.
- Reader feedback widgets are now easier to embed into topic content through the Topic Master Page, instead of keeping them as Reader UI elements. This gives you more customization options for those widgets.
File Manager
- Added the capability to create localizations of files to all languages automatically with a single click to make screenshot and downloadable file localization easier.
Table of Contents Panel
- New shortcut: Ctrl+Click to select/unselect a TOC node along with all its children.
- Node click behavior changed for authors: nodes are now selected and not expanded/collapsed on first click. Subsequent clicks on focused nodes do expand/collapse them as previously.
Web Help Output
- TOC nodes are now expanded on clicks by default. The behavior can be changed with the new “Expand/collapse nodes on caption click” Reader UI option of the exported publication.
- Google Analytics embed code is now added to Web Help if enabled in publication settings. The code snippet is used to report both page views and search queries made from Web Help.
- The “TOC button position” setting of the exported publication now affects Web Help output.
Publishing
- Publications are now replaced with zero downtime when using the “full replace” publishing mode.
- Authors now get publication warnings if:
- a published topic is locked;
- the base language version of a published translation topic is locked;
- only Ready topics are supposed to be published, but a published topic is transferred to another status while publishing.
Export
- When headings are generated for topics in the printed output (as opposed to using existing headings in topic content), removal of the existing first heading in a topic is now optional. The option is disabled by default.
- Added the “keep with text” option for all headings in exported content for printed formats by default.
- A number of popular fonts (Open Sans, Titillium Web, and others) are now supported for content styles in exported PDF documents.
- Word template files moved from Storage\Templates to Storage\Templates\Export\Printed.
REST API
- Index keywords are now returned via API when getting a topic.
Security
- Anonymous access denied for Storage folders containing logs, email notification templates, and Word templates for printed documentation export.
- It is now possible to create authentication tokens that can be used multiple times.
User Management
- Disabled users now have a special icon in all user lists in permission-related dialogs.
SEO
- Automatically generated sitemap files now include information on translations of each topic so that web search engines like Google can treat them as translations rather than duplicate content.
- Portal Home page now contains hreflang links pointing to all published translations of the Home page so that web search engines like Google can index them.
Global Find/Replace
- Added a confirmation dialog for the Replace All button.
Full-Text Search
- OpenSearch support implemented. You can now retrieve search results from your ClickHelp portal via OpenSearch, which allows integrating your portal with federated search engines (e.g., Salesforce search).
Other Improvements
- All project selectors for authors (security settings, new user creation dialog, etc.) now include a language filter, which can be used to display just the projects/publications you need.
Fixed Issues
Reader UI
- Clicks in topics no longer cause content to scroll to top for portals where iframe scrolling is used instead of page body scrolling (due to Branding.css customizations).
- Publication selector width is no longer too small if the navigation panel is disabled in Reader UI settings for the Deep Space template.
- Anchor link clicks now always cause scrolling, even if the current URL does not change in the browser address bar.
- Topic loading no longer hangs for readers using the uBlock Origin extension for Edge when AddThis integration is enabled for the publication.
- The “Link to this heading” icon now works correctly for headings which have non-Latin characters specified in their HTML IDs.
- It is no longer possible to vote for the same topic multiple times during a single user session.
- Duplicate links are no longer added to mini-TOC for topics having multiple snippets added to them.
- Publications having the “Hide from publication lists” option disabled are no longer included in the publication switcher combo box on the Articles page.
Full-Text Search
- Search results with the same relevance are no longer grouped around an older publication – the newest publication is now used for search results grouping.
- Topics containing words longer than 255 chars (e.g., Base64-encoded content) are now indexed correctly.
- Search queries containing the / character no longer produce invalid search result links.
- Fixed some topics not getting reindexed after being updated.
- Highlighting now works correctly in Dutch help topics when searching for a number of specific words.
API
- Word template file is now used for export correctly when specified via API.
- Cross-origin requests are no longer rejected when working with the API from JavaScript.
Topic Editor
- Fixed “Value cannot be null, relativeUrl” exception occurring when opening Link Viewer for a topic having links to files of an unfamiliar type (.jfif).
- Lists now behave correctly when adding new lines to them. Previously, newly created list items could not be focused in some cases.
- Fixed the default markup of the “Show More” Quick Part. Those portals that have that Quick Part modified will not be affected.
- Unlocking a topic from the Source view and then locking the topic again no longer leads to Design view markup displayed in the Source view.
- Topic status can now be changed twice in a row without triggering unexpected warning messages.
- Insert Topic Link dialog no longer shows a wrong topic in the topic selector as “Current Topic” and no longer suggests anchors from a wrong topic when no topic is selected.
- HTTP (not HTTPS) URLs are now converted to links automatically when selected, and the Ctrl+K shortcut is pressed.
- Full topic viewer UI is no longer displayed in snippet preview for snippets in dropdowns when editing topics in the Design view.
- The “Remove Highlighting” button is now hidden when entering topic editing mode.
- Author/reviewer names are no longer repeated in the Assignee/Owner picker when there are many users, and the list is scrolled.
- Occurrences in elements having a background defined are now highlighted correctly when using the Find/Replace feature in the Design view.
- The Insert Link dialog now handles complex selections correctly.
- Saving no longer hangs if performing a specific sequence of actions after inserting a new table.
- Conditions can now be removed successfully from an image located in a paragraph when selecting the paragraph via Tag Inspector.
- Video elements are no longer displayed as empty rectangles in the editing mode.
Reporting
- Fixed issue with portal-wide search queries (without publication filter) not displayed in the Search Results report table.
- Users who use tokens to log in to ClickHelp are now properly displayed in the Reader Count report.
Web Help
- Web Help topics no longer contain duplicate <title> tags.
- Web Help topics no longer contain duplicate meta charset tags.
- Mobile TOC navigation panel width is now calculated correctly (was half of the expected width previously).
- It is now possible to expand TOC nodes in mobile view via clicking a focused node – even when the expand/collapse button is hidden according to Branding settings.
Publishing
- Duplicate folders are no longer added to publications updated in the partial update mode.
- Breadcrumbs in topics with the “include publication link” option enabled now point to the publication as expected (could point to the published project previously).
Version History
- Variables and other placeholder elements (except code samples) are now highlighted correctly in the version comparison screen.
Security
- Fixed automatic cookie-based selection of Single Sign-On provider.
- Users having permissions to assign project/publication permissions (e.g., Administrator users) now see all projects/publications in the permission assignment tree, including projects/publications they don’t have permissions for.
- Topic links with a token and a hashbang in them now authenticate users and redirect them to the topic correctly.
- Attempts to reset a password for a disabled user no longer cause errors.
- Publication permissions are no longer reset unexpectedly if the “Configure Access” dialog is invoked and then closed via the Close button in the Publishing wizard.
User Profile
- New authors/reviewers no longer have all email notifications disabled by default.
- Changing date/time locale in user profile no longer causes errors.
Export
- Show more blocks and <div> tags having the display: none style applied to them are now hidden as expected when exporting to printed formats.
- Script errors are no longer displayed in exported CHM documents.
- The “‘0’ is not a valid value for ‘ActualSize.Width'” error no longer occurs when exporting a document having a table cell with zero width containing an image.
Import
- Fixed the “Failed to generate a unique Storage object name” error which may occur when importing many images from printed docs to the same project folder.
- Phone number links (tel:…) are no longer marked as broken links when importing manuals.
File Manager
- Image selector layout no longer becomes broken after saving changes in portal settings.
- File Manager adaptive behavior improved to handle small screens.
- Style and script files uploaded to Storage are no longer broken.
Global Find/Replace
- The task progress screen now displays the Finish button when the global replace operation is complete.
- The Cancel button no longer causes hanging when stopping a global replace operation.
Other
- Any “copy to Clipboard” actions (like “Copy Code” in code samples) no longer cause page scrolling.