Welcome to the Author-it 2020.R1 release. You will notice the change in our version and release numbering. This is to align ourselves with international standards and provide more clarity on the timing of the release. As you have probably figured out, it is the year followed by the release in that year, R1= Release 1.
Important: Author-it On Premises 2020.R1 requires .Net 4.88 or higher. This must be downloaded separately.
Author-it On Premises is now 64-bit, older versions should be un-installed prior to installing this release.
Upgrading of the Author-it installation means that the SQL database will also need to be upgraded. This upgrade means that it will no longer be compatible with previous versions of Author-it. We recommend performing User Acceptance Testing in a test environment with a backup of your production library prior to installing in the production environment.
All plugins must be recompiled. See information below for details.
General Notes
These release notes apply to Author-it version 2020.R1.
- Due to changes in Oracle Licensing for the Java Runtime Engine (JRE) required to compile and run JaveHelp and Oracle Help Author-it will not longer be distributing the JRE so can not run the compilers for these formats. Licensing for these compilers must now be purchased directly from Oracle.
- While Jet libraries are no longer supported (since 6.0) if you are still using one you will need to install an update to the Microsoft Access database engine before you will be able to open your library. You can download the Microsoft update here. Once thing to watch out for here is it needs to be the 64bit version of the Microsoft Access database engine, which also means you need to have the 64bit version of office installed. If you have the 32bit version of office installed, you will need to change to the 64bit version to be able to continue using Jet.
Change Summary
Author
- Book templates now let you define which topics must be or may be duplicated vs reused. Great for boilerplate or standard documents. Check out Book Content Duplication for more details.
- New create book function lets you select topics to be re-used, duplicated, or removed based on what the designer set in the template, and even lets you set metadata.
- It seems some of you were not as excited as we were about our new orange colour, so we added an option to set the colour of the Author UI (Hooray!)
- Publishing to ResolvedXML can now optionally include Review and Approval activities. This allows outputs like Magellan and PDF ProCSS to include change summaries in the future. This option is set in the Publishing Profile.
- When publishing hypertext links to PDF ProCSS using the synchronize topic heading function the anchor text is now published correctly.
- The Zip Files after publish action no longer results in an error.
- You can now use the Delete key in the Containing Text search field.
- The Remote Publishing Window is now automatically opened when running remote publishing jobs.
- Hierarchical variants with multi-select criteria now resolve correctly during publishing.
Contribute
- New create book function lets you select topics to be re-used, duplicated, or removed based on what the designer set in the template, and even lets you set metadata.
- Review and approval functionality added to Contribute see
- Save and Cancel options added to topics in Contribute Book Content Pane - Caption
- Administrators can now define Review settings in Contribute Define Review Release States and Settings in Contribute
- Users can now open and work in topics in Contribute when they do not have permission to styles used within the topic (this would previously result in a permission error)
- When using IE, the download links now work correctly when book description contains an accented character