We’ve just released RSpace version 1.53 and will be updating all our servers over the next few days. There are several significant improvements from 1.52 so we’d definitely recommend all self-managed customers to upgrade.

Firstly, we’ve improved our ability to support the full range of Unicode – something we should have done a while ago! The main beneficiaries will be our users wishing to use CJK fonts, but we also support a full range of scientific and mathematical characters now.

The keyboard shortcuts have proved popular, and in 1.53 we’ve added the ability to configure the editor toolbar layout:

The editor has a rich set of features, but the toolbar can look cluttered especially if you are using a small screen. The nice thing about this feature is that it is device-specific –  so if you’re editing an experiment on a mobile device, you can really cut down the toolbar to the bare essentials and give yourself more screen space for entering content. But when you get back to your laptop or desktop, you can have the full toolbar available for more detailed editing.

Last but by no means least of our major improvements, is versioned attachments. After replacing an attachment with a new version, you can see the current version makes with its version number. The revision history keeps attachments at the state they were in at the time the RSpace document revision was made – so the revision history really is  now a complete snapshot of the document at a point in time. Signed documents also fix the version of the attachment as well.

Upload a new version

version number is displayed

There are numerous other smaller improvements to the UI as well – more uniform styling of buttons, for example. We’ve also listened to the many requests to clarify the ‘Sharing’ dialog to make it more explicit who you’re actually sharing your work with, and have added some contextual help to guide you better.

We hope you enjoy this release – please keep the suggestions for improvements coming in!