Changelog

This week brings support for custom domains to the cloud hosted version of Outline. Now you can easily have wiki.myteam.com or kb.yourcompany.com without the hassle of hosting your own Outline servers.

Custom domains are available as an add-on for a flat rate of $20/mo. Interested? Contact support to arrange setup for your team.

We've made further improvements to importing, in particular it's now possible to import .doc files that are exported from Confluence, this is now the recommended format to get content from Confluence into Outline as it supports the greatest range of formatting – including tables.

We plan on releasing a CLI tool soon to allow bulk import for Confluence, Notion, GitHub and other services – watch this space!

Other fixes and improvements

Platform

• Teams using Google Workspace to sign-in can now still search their wiki from Slack after connecting in settings (previously this required Slack auth).
• Notification emails are now a little delayed to reduce the chances of receiving too many.
• Realtime connections are now more performant in Safari, aka the websocket doesn't always fall back to long-polling!

Editor

• When scrolling to headers from the table of contents the document will no longer scroll behind the fixed header area.
• There is no longer an erroneous pointer cursor on headings.

Other fixes and improvements

• Spotify embeds have been improved and better handle the wide variety of possible link types
• Fixed an issue that made it impossible to upload the same image twice without reloading the document
• Improved toolbar behavior to prevent it appearing with an empty selection

Much like last months update our focus continues to be on little details, performance, and bug fixing rather than new features – but some solid new functionality did sneak in with the help of open source contributors…

HTML + Word Import

You can now import HTML and Microsoft Word documents simply by dragging them onto a collection, or from the collection context menu. We also improved the look and feel of GSuite embeds.

New + Unread badges

Lists of documents now show when you last viewed the doc – and new, unread documents are highlighted with a badge so it's easier to spot changes you missed.

Other fixes and improvements

Platform

• Share links can now be embedded in iframes
• Document and collection titles can now be edited from the sidebar by double clicking
• Improvements to focus accessibility
• You can now unpublish a document that was previously published via the overflow "..." menu
• It's now possible to restore documents when their collection has been deleted
• When a document is deleted the metadata now reflects the correct user
• It's now possible to view all possible locations when choosing where to move a document
• An issue with nested modals not stacking correctly
• Clicking to "change permissions" when editing a collection now works correctly
• A document that previously had it's share revoked can now be re-shared
• Shares related to deleted documents no longer appear in the admin area
• It's no longer possible to create a child document inside a deleted document
• Improved handling of deleted documents/collections over websockets
• Fixed new revisions being skipped if identical to previously autosaved revision
• Document history sidebar now has a header and button to close

Editor

• It's now possible to use line breaks in table cells with Shift+Enter
• Google docs, sheets and presentations can now be embedded without requiring "Publish to web" first
• Styling and behavior of doc link search was improved to be more reliable
• Selected content in the editor can now be dragged to reorder
• Table of contents now shows correctly when navigating directly to a document url (eg from a bookmark)
• It's now possible to toggle a blockquote via the formatting toolbar (previously blockquotes would be continuously nested)
• Headers inside notice blocks are now the correct color in dark mode
• Checkboxes can now be toggled in read only mode via the keyboard
• Enter key in document title now adds a new paragraph below the title
• Keyboard shortcuts now work when document title is focused
• It's now possible to underline text in the editor with CMD+U
• Horizontal dividers are no longer selectable in read-only
• Automatic linking of pasted URL's is now more reliable
• Document titles no longer look faded in Safari
• Fixed cursor navigation around headings in Firefox
• There is no longer a small pointer dead zone over links when hover card is visible
• It's now possible to select embeds in the editor
• "ClickUp" added to embed integrations
• The positioning of the formatting toolbar has been improved to be more predictable
• It is now possible to search for existing docs using their URL

The last two weeks we've been focused on bug fixing, performance and reliability. We've always taken pride in the speed of Outline and keeping the app fast requires constant ongoing attention and maintenance. One place that hadn't been optimized in a while was the initial javascript bundle download size, which has now dropped from 2.8Mb to just 700Kb.

Some of this updates improvements (Marked with a [os]) are brought to you by open source contributions, for this we're very thankful!

Enhancements

• [os] It's now (finally) possible to use line breaks in table cells with Shift+Enter
• [os] The document history sidebar now has a header and a button to close
• The interface for moving documents got cleaned up and it's now easier to tell where the moved document will end up
• The app will now redirect to the parent document instead of the collection when deleting a child document
• [os] You can now unpublish a document that was previously published via the overflow (...) document menu

Fixes

• Selected content in the editor can now be dragged to reorder
• When a document is deleted the metadata now reflects the correct user
• It's now possible to view all possible locations when choosing where to move a document
• Table of contents now shows correctly when navigating directly to a document
• A document that previously had it's share revoked can now be reshared if you have permission
• Shares related to deleted documents no longer appear in the admin listing
• The option to create a child document inside a document in the trash no longer appears
• It's now possible to toggle a blockquote via the formatting toolbar (previously blockquotes would be continuously nested)
• Headers inside notice blocks are now the correct color in dark mode
• Checkboxes toggled via the keyboard are now persisted correctly

Today we’re adding the much-requested ability to create team document templates in Outline. Templates are a simple, but powerful way to keep your docs consistent and reliable. In the near future we’ll also publish recommended templates and make them easy to use from within your team.

How to create a template

There are two ways to create a template:

1. Navigate to "Templates" in the left sidebar, then hit "New template…" in the top right, choose a collection and write your template.
2. Find an existing doc that you would like to create a template from, click on the overflow menu "..." (usually in the top right) and then "Create template…".

Once you’re editing a template, simply highlight some text and click on the new "placeholder" icon in the toolbar to convert the text into a placeholder that can be filled out by anyone that creates a new doc from the template.

How to use a template

Simply start a new doc, a "Templates" option will appear in the top right corner until the document is first saved.

Other fixes and improvements

• Click on the last updated timestamp below the document title now opens the history sidebar.
• The behavior of the floating toolbar was improved.
• It is now possible to toggle the state of checkboxes without explicitly going into "Edit".
• When a document is publicly shared this is now denoted by a globe icon in the share button.
• Fixed some ugly styling issues introduced by the latest Chrome releases.
• Fixed an issue where after you have chosen a collection icon it might get reset if you continue to edit the collection name.
• Fixed a case where websocket connections would not reconnect automatically.
• Fixed an issue that would prevent editing the beginning of long collection descriptions.
• Fixed rendering of GitHub Gist embeds.
• Fixed an error that could on rare occasions cause the app to form a reload loop.

This week we added a new content type for your documents called "notices". You can use them to highlight information for readers such as important information, or to add additional context around the main content.

There are three types of notices available today – "info", "warning", and "tip".

How to use

As always, you can access blocks through the /slash menu, just type /notice on a new line, /tip, /warning and many others will work too so you don’t need to remember specific incantations… It’s also possible to type ::: as a shortcut to insert a new notice in a hurry.

Other improvements

• When creating a new collection an icon is no longer automatically chosen once you’ve picked one manually.
• We made some improvements to last releases "hover previews" so that more information is visible.
• There is now a link to create an account from the sign-in page.
• Several styling, layout, and focus issues were tidied up.

New Features

• Hovering over internal links to other documents now shows detailed "preview cards" so you can get an idea of the document without clicking through.

Enhancements

• A new, cleaner and faster login page
• The team name is now shown in page titles
• A new documents.export endpoint was added to the API to quickly grab documents in Markdown format

Fixes

• Lucidchart embeds now work across the various Lucidchart subdomains

New Features

• The slash menu now has the option to create a link
• You can now make collections easier to discover and pick out in the sidebar by setting an icon and color.

Fixes

• Various mistakes in API documentation have been addressed
• Editor placeholder is now hidden when uploading an image
• Document meta data, references, and editor UI are no longer visible when printing a document
• Italics and blockquotes are now displayed correctly when printing in Google Chrome
• Email signin users are now marked as active when they first accept an invite

Enhancements

• It's now possible to create documents directly from the link editor, or hit CMD+K and type a document title
• Improved loading state for the sidebar
• Improved readability of some UI in dark mode
• Documents will now update in realtime when reading and another user edits

Fixes

• It's no longer possible to trigger the keyboard shortcut help by typing "?" when editing a document
• Admins can now downgrade a suspended admin to a user
• User profile now reads 'invited' instead of 'joined' when team member has yet to sign-in
• Backslash in search queries is now correctly escaped
• Suspended users no longer show as options when adding team members to groups and collections

Enhancements

• Exported markdown files are now cleaner than ever before

Fixes

• Fixed an issue that could cause checkbox list items with escaped characters in the text to show the escape characters after reload
• Fixed an error when adding Github Gist embeds
• Fixed an error when attempting to load a group where a user has had their account removed
• Invalid regex error on Safari when filtering users with some characters
• We now auto focus the search input when adding users to a collection
• Imported documents now get a best-guess title based on the content and file name
• It's no longer possible to get checkbox state out of sync with view by clicking rapidly
• Placeholder or "Type / to insert text" can no longer can appear behind images
• Fixed an error when pasting markdown into the document
• Fixed an error when attempting to make a selection that surrounds an embed
• Pressing "Escape" key in link editor now restores editor focus

Fixes

• Code blocks imported from other sources with unsupported languages no longer crash the editor
• Overlay background when zooming into images now respects the theme

This is the biggest release of Outline since we first published the source code. The editor is entirely rebuilt from the ground up for extensibility and speed, allowing us to move faster than ever before and is the culmination of more than 4 months of planning and work.

The improvements and fixes are almost too numerous to count, but the most important are listed below:

Enhancements

• Document rendering performance increased by leaps and bounds, some of our extreme test documents went from 30seconds -> 300ms to render
• A new menu for inserting blocks is much more intuitive than before, type "/" at the beginning of a line or hit the "+" button to trigger

• Updating a document's title now also updates any links to the document in other docs automatically
• "Highlight" now appears as an option in the formatting menu
• It's now possible to type a url in markdown formatting
• Quotes are converted to smart quotes as you type
• Support for paragraph breaks in list items
• It's now possible to choose the "system" theme and have Outline follow your system's dark mode preference – this is especially useful on macOS when dark mode is set to "auto" to go dark in the evenings.

Fixes

• Support for alternative input methods, this finally brings the fix for typing in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and all other languages that use a soft keyboard for input.
• Restored the ability to disable embeds on a single doc in the context menu
• Fixed some extra scrollbars that appear depending on your input device
• It's now possible to save a document with only a title
• Long titles now wrap onto multiple lines again
• Document headings are centered correctly again when scrolled
• Adding a new row to a table now respects column alignment
• Improved key handling in link editor
• Issues with markdown shortcuts surrounded in whitespace not applying

Enhancements

• Buttons now stand out better in dark mode
• If the editor fails to load because a deploy happened the app will now auto-recover

Fixes

• Fixed a regression in the styling of document titles in dark mode
• Improved the usability of the image cropping tool in dark mode
• Escape characters no longer incorrectly appear in the table of contents

Fixes

• Crash on share links introduced in previous release
• Crash on editing documents with image/embed as first node

Enhancements

• The table of contents moved from being hidden on the edge of the screen to optionally toggleable inline with the document content. It follows your scroll position, highlights the active section and is just generally much more usable now. Toggle on the new contents with the icon at the end of the breadcrumb in the document header.

• Titles also gained a metadata line underneath which shows the last team member to edit the document and the total number of times it's been viewed – we plan to keep increasing the utility of this area.

Fixes

• Timestamps now update while you're viewing a screen without needing to navigate or refresh.
• The document history sidebar now scrolls independently of the document content
• The document history sidebar now loads correctly if you navigate straight to a history link
• Document updated notification emails now take into account your teams subdomain
• All collaborators on a document will now receive notification emails, rather than just the document creator (If they have chosen to do so in settings).
• < Back buttons in modals can no longer scroll off-screen
• Long document titles are now better handled in the navigation sidebar

New Features

Groups! It's now possible to organize your team into groups and assign groups with read or write permissions to collections. You can use this to give part of your team read-only access and retain write access for others.

You can manage groups from Settings -> Groups or directly from any Collection -> Permissions…

Enhancements

• Embeds are now supported for Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets

Fixes

• Fixed a link in the welcome documents to point to the public site.

Fixes

• Newly created documents should auto focus
• Clicking in whitespace at end of document should focus on the last line
• Alignment of document loading placeholder

Enhancements

• The people management screens now include pagination to support larger teams
• When a modal opens from a modal it now visually "stacks" to provide a navigational clue

Fixes

• Rich embeds are now enabled on publicly shared documents
• Fixed an issue where newly created private collections would be missing some available actions until the app is reloaded
• The "New nested document" option no longer appears for drafts (previously it errored)
• Attempt to edit a document while viewing it's history no longer errors

We're continuing to make great headway with two big features in February; rewriting the editor to be more stable and performant (think 10x faster!) and bringing group permissions to the app. In the meantime, some important fixes have also been made in the last few weeks…

Fixes

• It's now possible to access documents with _ or ~ characters in the title, previously links would break
• Also, it was possible for navigation to get 'stuck' when moving between documents with similar titles, this no longer happens
• Slack notifications are now working correctly again
• The app will no longer break if a deploy happens between loading the app and loading a document (quite the edge case!)