Changelog

Introducing emoji reactions for comments – a much-requested way to respond to feedback and collaborate with team members. Every comment can now be reacted to with an emoji, and you can see who reacted to a comment and how many reactions it has received from the comment menu.

Other improvements

• There is now a Leave document menu item on documents that have been shared with you
• "Smart text" replacements can be disabled in preferences
• Mermaid diagrams now have syntax highlighting for their source code
• Publicly shared docs now have a button to toggle the sidebar
• cmd+f search in page now supports diacritics

The comment sidebar can now be sorted by the comment's position in the document. This is particularly nice for long documents where you want to see the comments in the order they appear rather than the order they were created.

Look for the sort option in the top right of the comment sidebar.

Other improvements

• When mentioning a user you can now search by email
• Publicly shared docs now have the option to disable search engine indexing
• CSV files can now be imported, they will be converted to a table
• Collections now include reverse alphabetical sorting as an option

It is now possible to add groups directly to documents, all members of the group will receive access to the document and all nested documents with the chosen permissions. Use this to share portions of a larger collection with a mix of stakeholders.

Groups will appear as a new sharing option in the existing Share button. See the guide to sharing for more info.

Other improvements

• You can now embed any webpage with the /embed command
• Added R language highlighting in code blocks
• Templates can now be shared with the entire workspace
• The e shortcut now refocuses the editor if unfocused

It's now possible to resolve comment threads on documents from the comment menu. You can always view and restore a document's resolved comments by clicking the checkmark icon at the top right of the sidebar. This provides a way to keep discussions focused and organized.

You can now select emoji and icons for both document and collection in one unified UI – this finally enables using emoji for collections and icons on documents. We also added even more new icons to choose from in this release.

This release adds the ability to highlight text in the editor in a variety of colors. This is a great way to draw attention to important parts of your document, or to categorize different sections. Use the upgraded highlighter tool in the selection toolbar to get started.

This week we've made some highly requested improvements to tables in Outline, this will be one of many improvements to the editor in the coming weeks and months. Here's what's new:

• Column resizing: You can now resize columns by dragging the border between them
• Full-width tables: Tables now expand to the full width of the editor
• More content: Table cells now support embeds, code blocks, and all other content types
• Toggleable headers: You can now toggle a header row and column
• Improved overflow: Tables now scroll horizontally when they're too wide for the editor
• Improved row and column controls: We've made it one click to add rows and columns

We've added a new Guest role to help you collaborate with external users on your documents. The Guest role allows you to share your documents with external users without giving them full access to your workspace.

When you invite a user as a Guest, they can only view and comment on the documents and collections you explicitly share with them – no default access applies.

We've added over 80 new collection icons to help you better organize your documents. You can now choose from a wide range of new icons to represent your collections from DNA, to a tent – there's a wider variety to choose from.

To change the icon of a collection, head to Edit in the collection menu and then click on the current icon.

The new GitHub integration allows you to connect your GitHub repositories to your Outline workspace. Once connected, links to GitHub issues and pull requests will show detailed information on hover, in a future update we will also allow expanding these links to show more context inline.

To setup simply head to Settings -> Integrations -> GitHub and connect one or more organizations.

This week brings user management to the document level. Previously all permissions were managed on Collections, but now you are able to share individual documents with specific people to view or edit. This is great for sharing private notes or drafts with a small group of people.

We also gave the sharing interface a new look and a lot more clarity over who has access to the document and what level of access they have.

To get started, simply click the Share button in the document header or check out the sharing documentation for more details.

One of the biggest problems with a team knowledge base is that it can be difficult to find the information you need amongst hundreds or thousands of documents. Even with great search it can be hard to know the exact phrasing to use to find the right document.

Now we've built a new feature that allows you to get direct answers to questions from your knowledge base simply by asking them in the search or command menu! Answers are dynamically generated based on the documents you have permission to access.

To get started, any workspace admin can enable the feature under Settings -> Features -> Ai Answers. Find out more information in the documentation, and let us know what you think!

We've made some great improvements to the way that document exports are constructed this week. These changes allow Mermaid diagrams and rich embeds to be rendered correctly in HTML and PDF exports going forward, other formatting was also improved to make these look even nicer.

Other fixes and improvements

• Embedded videos now display correctly when viewing a documents history
• Emoji's in templates are now applied correctly
• Mobile now has a "Share" option in the document menu
• Todo items in editor can now be toggled with Cmd+Enter (Ctrl+Enter on Windows)
• When copying a document you can now choose whether to include child documents
• Added support for Instagram and LinkedIn embeds

Outline now supports commenting on text inside of code blocks, this is particularly useful – as we all know that naming things is the hardest part of coding and now you can discuss the best name for that variable right inside of the code block.

You can now upload videos and embed a player directly into any Outline document. Just like images, we also added the ability to resize the video to fit and write a custom caption.

To embed a video simply drag and drop into the document, or find the "Video" option in the block menu. For more information checkout our guide to inserting blocks on Outline.

It's now possible to find and replace text in the document editor in both the web and desktop apps. You can access the find and replace dialog by using Cmd + f, or Ctrl + f on Windows.

The find and replace dialog supports both regular expressions and case sensitivity as well.

This week brings the addition of hover previews, you can now see the details of internal documents, mentioned users, and external links when hovering over them in the editor. We have built the system to be extensible so that previews of authenticated integrations (think GitHub, Linear, etc) can be added in the near future too.

Hover over any link in a document or comment to see the new functionality.

Code blocks have received a visual refresh and are now easier to use. Code highlighting was updated to look much better in dark mode and tons of extra languages were added in the last month.

Mermaid diagrams are now rendered in realtime as you type and also received the same visual improvements as code blocks.

Building on last months release of comments, this month brings in-app notifications support so you can quickly catch up on what's happening in your workspace and jump straight to the relevant document.

Collection admins

We also added the ability to make members admins in specific collections, this new role allows members to manage the collection details, including adding and removing other workspace members.

Regular collection membership no longer allows members to manage the collection – see the documentation for more detail on permissions.

Go to documentation →

It's been a long time coming – commenting is finally available in Outline, opening up a whole new world of use cases and collaboration! While we iron out the kinks it's disabled by default, but you can enable the feature for your team in Settings -> Features -> Commenting.

Once enabled you'll see a new comments sidebar become available. You can add comments to any document or to a specific text selection, we also support threaded replies, notifications, @mentions, basic formatting and images in comments.

We're eager to hear your feedback, please let us know what you think.