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Natural Docs 2.2 development release 1
December 9th, 2020

Time to start a new round of development releases for 2.2.  What do we have so far?

Custom Home Pages

Now you can use your own HTML file to serve as the home page instead of the default one.  Just create an advanced style, add a HTML file to the style's folder, and add "Home Page: [file name]" to Style.txt.  It will appear in the content area on the home page, highlighted below.  The header and menu will still be there for people to navigate.

You can also put these strings anywhere in the HTML and Natural Docs will replace them with the project information.  This is useful if you wanted to add a build timestamp that updates automatically.

  • %NaturalDocs_Title%

  • %NaturalDocs_Subtitle%

  • %NaturalDocs_Copyright%

  • %NaturalDocs_Timestamp%

This feature isn't documented on the web site yet, but if you run the new version of Natural Docs you'll see it in the comments inside Style.txt.

HTML Refresh

I updated the default style of the generated documentation.  The design and appearance are still fundamentally the same, so you might not even notice much unless you were looking at a before and after.  However, there were lots and lots of little tweaks and cleanup that's more noticeable on higher resolution displays.  Here's what's changed:

  • SVG icons.  No more blurry icons on high resolution displays.

  • Moved the footer.  Now instead of a too small bar stretching across the bottom of the entire page, it's a panel on the bottom of the leftmost menu.  This gives you more vertical space for the summary and content panels and also allows me to increase the font size a bit to make it more readable.  You can see it in the screen shot above.

  • Font change.  It now uses the default UI font on Windows and macOS for better readability and familiarity.  If you preferred the old look you can always use a simple style to set things back to a combination of Tahoma and Trebuchet MS.

    Also remember that since 2.1 the code font for prototypes has been improved on macOS and Linux.  No more Courier!

  • Modernized HTML.  I removed a lot of cruft that was there to support ancient browsers.  Did you know Natural Docs 2.0 originally had Internet Explorer 8 as its baseline?  Plus some tweaks to make IE6 and IE7 at least functional?  While it was fun to see comments referencing Firefox 4, that's a lot of old crap that can be ripped out.

    I'm still pretty conservative on browser support though so the new baseline is Internet Explorer 11.  The pre-Chromium version of Edge is still supported as well.

  • Lots and lots of obsessive little tweaks to margins and alignments and such to make sure everything lines up right and is spaced nicely.

There's still some more tweaking to do, mostly the colors for prototypes and syntax highlighting, but the rest of it is done.

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