A Better Print Experience for Digital Handbooks

In January, the Blissbook team survived 2+ feet of snow in DC and at least 7 minutes of flurries in Atlanta in order to bring you some new Blissbook goodness!

Here are the updates for early February!

Upgraded Print & PDF

For a long time, we’ve supported printing a handbook by applying special styling that gets applied if a user printed a handbook from their browser. This didn’t work right for some older browsers, the formatting wasn’t always perfect, and there was nothing in the interface that let users know they could print. Those days are over!

All users now have a “Print to PDF” option when viewing their handbook. This opens or downloads a pdf file (depending on your browser) that can easily be printed. This works across all browsers.

Admins also have a link at the bottom of their CMS, next to “view”, that they can use to print the handbook. You can also “print” a preview, although it gets a DRAFT watermark.

The print/PDF handbook respects all access control, so users printing a handbook will only be able to print the content that they’ve been given access to.

If you take a look and notice that your print version looks funky, please let us know so we can fix it!

FTPS

We added a new way to sync your employee list via FTP. You can now sign in to a secure FTP server via a supplied username and password using either TLS or SSL security.

Bugs

We fixed a number of bugs that most users never noticed.

What’s Next?

We’ll be extending access control one step further, so that custom sections can be shown to specific people (or groups of people). This means you can organize your chapter content by topic and have group-specific content within.

We’re also working on a new navigation interface for published Blissbooks, including a better way to search.