Changelog

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!)

Enhancements

• Other team members presence is now shown on documents – you can see when others are viewing or editing!
• We added easily accessible search inputs at the top of the "Home" page and collection screens
• Your own drafts are now visible in collections instead of having to go specifically to the "Drafts" section

Fixes

• Documents returned in search results no longer have an empty context menu
• Invited users no longer appear as an option in "Filter by author"
• Search filter dropdowns no longer have unnecessary scrollbars
• The sidebar in dark mode on mobile is no longer partially transparent
• Creating and revoking API keys now produces events in the audit trail
• Drafts no longer appear as options to insert as links into documents

Enhancements

• Documents with nested sub-documents now display an index view more prominently
• Clicking into a document will preload it's nested documents for faster navigation
• In the API parentDocumentId is now available as a filter for listing documents

Fixes

• The "Invite people" view did not work when accessed from "Collection members", it now works as expected
• Emails are now stored and processed only in lowercase
• Sidebar did not display correctly on mobile when editing a document

New Features

• It's now possible to invite guests to your wiki that can sign-in with their email address.
• We added the "Trash" menu item in the sidebar which shows recently deleted documents and gives you an opportunity to restore them for 30 days.

Enhancements

• Added a new keyboard shortcut (CMD+SHIFT+P) to publish the current document
• Added support for InVision live image links

Fixes

• Selecting "Document history" when the history sidebar is already open now closes the sidebar
• Toggling "Starred" in the document menu now keeps the menu open so that feedback is visible
• Fixed an issue that would prevent moving a document inside another within a private collection
• "Import document" in collection menu now works when triggered from the sidebar
• Fixed an issue that caused regex-like search queries to error
• Fixed unable to embolden hashtags in editor
• Fixed an extra space character in the editor when typing markdown shortcuts
• Fixed a display issues with collaborator avatars not overlapping

New Features

• It is now possible to set a collection membership to be read-only, this is currently only an option in private collections but will soon be extended to all collections.
• "Child documents" are now automatically listed at the bottom of a document

Enhancements

• The people list now shows the time the person was last active instead of when they joined the team.
• Added a button to create a new document when no search results are returned for a query
• Drafts now have a clear badge and show which collection the draft is published in
• Improved the behavior of sidebar collapsing and nesting

Fixes

• Attempting to sign-in to a suspended account now shows a useful message
• It's now possible to use the Slack integration in conjunction with Google sign-in
• Popover menus can no longer open off-screen
• The first auto-save of a document no longer causes the text cursor to become unfocused
• Fixed an issue where the audit log would fail to log if any of the event actors had been deleted
• Importing documents using drag-n-drop no longer causes it to potentially appear under multiple sub-documents
• Attempting to export an empty collection no longer fails
• Removed an orphaned header when there are no archived documents
• Duplicating a draft no longer automatically publishes the duplicate
• Document no longer appears blank if you create a link back to itself