What’s new in Author-it

Author-it Cloud

• The password policy has been updated. A password no longer needs to meet specific length or character requirements, rather it just needs to be strongly rated.
• Next time Author is opened on a desktop, you might notice the Copy Password button has made a return. This can be clicked if you don’t want to download a new RDP file every time you open Author — just click Copy Password, open your existing RDP file, then paste the password in. Clicking Open on Desktop still copies the password to your clipboard too, so you can keep using that option if your prefer.

Author

• The error messages that appear in the log when you import a Word file have been improved. The new error messages give specific details for several problems (such as a grouped image that needs to be replaced by a single image) so you can fix import issues quicker and more accurately.

Magellan

• An image’s alternate text has been added to Magellan’s search results. This makes it possible to search for an image and provides better search results for lines of text that have an image in them (for example, a procedure step that includes an image of a button).
  The alternative text appears in [square brackets] so that your visitors know it’s describing an image.

Translations

• An extra status to translation jobs has been added: Draft Imported. This status makes it fast and easy to see which translations jobs are in review, draft imported and final imported.
• It is now possible to include empty topics in translation jobs. This is a great way to ensure that the translated topic’s content matches the source topic’s content. For example, when a source topic used to contain text, the text was translated and then the source topic was cleared. Including the empty topic in the translation job ensures that the translated topic will also be empty.

Review

• When you complete an approval review, the topic totals in the Complete Approval Review window now include child topics.

What’s been improved or fixed?

Author

• Improved Author’s performance when saving and duplicating topics, especially those with large tables. Author will save these topics faster and is less likely to encounter errors or stop responding.
• Help > Show Log will consistently show your log files instead of occasionally being blank.
• Any new topics you create will now use the topic template’s heading settings. Previously, the new topic would use the topic’s description for its headings even if the topic template was set up with un-editable headings (for example, an empty heading that couldn’t be changed).
• Links are now imported correctly when you import a Word document’s contents. The links retain their original casing (instead of being converted to lower case), and links with # symbols are successfully imported. HTTPS and other special characters in URLs are supported as well.
• Turning on ‘Show Paragraph Markers’ and then opening a topic that has embedded topics with non-breaking spaces or hyphens will no longer cause error messages to appear. The topic opens as normal with highlighted NBS and NBHs. Previously, the message ‘the selection contains protected text’ would appear multiple times, one time for each non-breaking space and hyphen.

Magellan

• You can now change the name of Magellan’s Search Results page. The string ‘Search results’, on Magellan’s search page, will show the value you enter for it in Magellan’s language JSON text files. Previously, it always showed ‘Search results’.

Review

• When selecting a review’s start and end dates, clicking the calendar icon will now open the date picker.
• Review now prevents you from dragging the ‘complete review’ window into an inaccessible position such as outside the browser boundary.
• Review now uses the correct colors for topics in various states instead of only using bold for topics that require review:
• Gray: Topic isn’t in the review.
• Normal: Logged in user has completed their review on this topic.
• Bold: Topic is awaiting review.
• Orange: Another participant has commented on a topic that you’ve already marked as complete.

Publishing

• Fixed an issue that prevented linked images from appearing in ProCSS outputs when the linked images folder path included an ampersand ‘&’ symbol.

Author-it Administrator

• Topics that have their object code appear inside their content as text now retain their embedded topics when you run “Check topic relationships” in Author-it Administrator. Previously, if a topic’s code appeared inside its content (for example, if the topic referenced a purchase order number that happened to match the topic’s code) running “Check topic relationships” would remove that topic’s first embedded topic.

For additional information on the release, please go to the Author-it Knowledge Center!