21 January: A better site footer, clearer cards, keyboard formatting and more

This week we’ve made visual improvements to your site’s footer, added placeholders to empty card fields, add keyboard formatting options, and more

✨ New and noteworthy

Footer improvements

We’ve shipped a number of improvements to the footer, which all add up to a cleaner and more adaptive look for the bottom of your page.

• We’ve increase the footer logo size to allow for wider logos. If your site already used a wider logo, you’ll notice that it now displays larger and fits better on the page.

• We’ve also improved the layout of the footer, so that your links and the copyright notice align perfectly with your page content.

These changes are all live now, and your site footer should have updated automatically.

As well as increasing the size of the footer icon, the new footer also aligns your links to the content of your page.

More card improvements

We’ve been making a number of improvements to cards over the last few weeks, and that continues this week. Here are the latest updates:

• You’ll now see placeholders on any card with empty text and number fields to show that data is needed in those slots. Other empty card elements also now show buttons that prompt you to add links, files, users or a multi-selection with a click.

• We’ve also improved the alert tooltip that appears when you insert a non-numeric value into a number field. It’ll simply notify you that the content of the field needs to be a number.

• We’ve update the default content of a card block. Previously new card blocks featured three cards, each with three empty fields. We’ve updated this, so the default for a card block to be one card with one line of text, and a placeholder next to it to add more.

It should now be clearer when cards have empty fields, and what kind of content you need to add to each one.

Keyboard formatting in the GitBook app

You can now add keyboard formatting to any text in GitBook — perfect for writing keyboard shortcuts in your docs. For example, you could tell people that they can hit ⌘+/ or Ctrl+/ to open a block’s Options menu in GitBook, if you really wanted to.

To add keyboard formatting, highlight the text you want to format and choose the Keyboard option from the inline palette.

Easily revert site customization overrides

When you’re customizing a docs site with multiple site sections or variants, you can easily set site-wide customizations. But you can also override customization settings for specific sections or variants, if you want.

Previously, once you changed something at a section or variant level that override couldn’t be reset. Now, we’ve added a button that let’s you reset any overrides back to the site-wide settings, so you can quickly align all your site spaces once again.

This button will reset any site section or variant customization overrides back to the site-wide settings.

Improved

• We’ve reworked our notification emails to fix formatting and add a logo, so it’s easier to see what your notification is about and who it’s coming from.

• Ask AI now also takes context from the page title and description, which should result in better answers for people asking questions.

• We’ve also improved the follow-up questions you’ll see after you ask GitBook AI a question. The questions should still be relevant, and will focus on topics that your docs can provide an answer to.

• You can now rename spaces in your organization right from the sidebar. Just find your space, open the Actions menu and choose Rename.

• When you are viewing changes using diff view, deleted paragraphs now show with red highlighting and a strikethrough across the whole paragraph. Before, deleted paragraphs were only marked in red, making them harder to spot in some instances.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue that sometimes caused lost content when a change request merge took longer than 10 seconds, and in a few other circumstances.

• Fixed a regression that prevented horizontal alignment from working in tables after we introduced vertical alignment last week.

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We’re constantly working on improving the way you and your team work in GitBook, and value your input on features, bugs, and more. Make sure you head to our official GitBook community to join the discussion.