1 April: New and improved tables, announcement banners, custom fonts and more

Huge table improvements and custom fonts for published sites lead the way this week — which also marks GitBook’s 11th birthday! 🎉

✨ New and noteworthy

New and improved tables

We’ve completely overhauled table blocks in GitBook to make them more functional and predictable. While they may look similar in the editor, they’ve been totally reworked in the backend to improve performance and make them more practical as a block.

Tables now feature placeholders to make it easier to insert new rows and columns. We’ve also made reordering columns easier when your have wide tables that scroll to show more content.

And, following on from our recent work on card blocks, we’ve also improved the empty states for some cells to make it easier to complete actions, such as adding a file to a files cell.

Plus, if you have a table column using the Select option, you can now add new selection options from the table without opening a modal. Simply type your option and click Add… in the modal.

We’ve also got a new UX for column resizing, and an improved UI for reordering rows and columns by dragging-and-dropping. You can also reorder columns by hitting Enter or Space and then use the arrow keys to reorder them.

Plus we’ve made a bunch of other smaller improvements that improve the usability of tables across the board.

Overall this represents a huge upgrade for tables, making them much easier to use and interact with in the editor. As with any major rework, if you spot anything that’s not working as you expect, reach out to support or report it directly in our GitHub community.

Add announcement banners to published docs

Need to tell users about a product update, time-sensitive announcement or new marketing push? You can now add an announcement banner to the top of your docs site with an icon, text and a link CTA — just like we have right now on this page. Side note: you should fill out the State of Docs survey 😁

Head to our docs to find out how to add a custom announcement banner to your docs — including how to customize their color and icon.

Use custom fonts on your docs site

You can now upload your own custom font for your docs site, so your site accurately matches your brand’s style guide.

Right now GitBook supports .woff and .woff2 file formats. Take a look at to our docs to read more about how to add a custom font to your site. Custom fonts are available for Ultimate sites — head to our pricing page to find out more.

Breadcrumbs in search results

When you use search on a published docs site, you’ll now see breadcrumbs for section groups, sections and variants in the search results. Previously the results would only show one, which could be confusing if the result was in a site variant within a site section.

Improved

• We’ve rolled out the new version of our published docs platform to a few more select organizations as we expand our testing. It should result in improved performance and faster loading times on docs site. We’ll continue testing and will roll it out to more docs sites soon.

• We’ve made some small improvements to the way that the GitBook editor renders content, which should make things load and animate more smoothly.

• You can now view your site insights over the past 3 months, making it easier to view progress and improvement over time.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue with files that had long names. Previously the name would overlap in the Files modal — now they will hyphenate to span multiple lines.

• Fixed a visual issue where the comment and feedback buttons alongside each other would be different sizes in the editor.

• Fixed another issue with the comment and feedback buttons that meant they weren’t all neatly aligned — and would sometimes be cut off. Now they should all align perfectly on the right-hand side of the editor.

• Fixed an issue that could occur when moving a site section into a group in your site settings.

• Fixed a bug that was making card size inconsistent between read-only and edit modes in the editor.

• Fixed a bug that meant there was no data value for buttons in the header when you opened your site’s insights panel.

• Fixed a bug that made adding a new block above a divider block cumbersome. Now you can select the current block above a divider and simply hit Enter.

• Fixed a bug that meant that some docs sites that had previously used custom header colors were seeing odd results when using our latest customization options. These sites will now see results that match the selections in the Customization menu.

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We’re constantly working to improve 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.