2022-Q2

Notebook improvements, command-line interface, and websites!

Jun 28, 2022ยถ

We fixed a bug that caused the app to crash when switching to the Document Outline view and back again, which caused the app to crash. This has been fixed!

We have made a number of improvements to links in the editor, and now autocorrection of common URLs (.com, .net, .org, etc.) are recognized and treated appropriately. We also recognize mailto: and email links in the editor as well as giving you more freedom to have non-validated URLs (e.g. relative links). We certainly recognized this when adding index.md to the editor (.py and .md are both top-level domains as well as common file extensions!), and it would turn it into a link, that no longer happens.

Jun 24, 2022ยถ

Try Curvenoteยถ

We launched a new service https://try.curvenote.com/ allowing to you deploy websites directly from GitHub!

Curvenote CLI - Improvements and fixes ๐Ÿ›ยถ

  • Image width and alignment from figure directives are now honored when websites are built (link)
  • Notebooks with bookmark anchors e.g. <a id="sectionA"></a> no longer cause errors. (link)
  • Fixed an issue when running the curvenote init and curvenote start on windows (link)
  • Fixed various issues affecting the loading of outputs in website pages built from notebooks, notebook outputs now load faster and more reliably
  • Plain URLs found in markdown are now automatically transformed into links (link)
  • Added a --write-toc option that will create a _toc.yml file during the command, writing out the implicitly build table of contents and allowing you to customize that
  • The CLI now recognizes kernelspec and juptext front matter allowing for markdown based notebooks to be included in site builds
  • We now recognize Zenodo URLs as DOIs e.g. Cockett, 2022 and have broadened the other DOIs we catch (e.g. eLife and a few more!).
  • ๐Ÿ› we fixed a bug on windows where the curvenote init and curvenote start commands were failing.
  • curvenote init will still initialize a site if the folder has a curvenote.yml file, as long as there is no site section
  • curvnote init will also honor any existing project hierarchy in the local folder, and build default site navigation based on that.

Jun 20, 2022 - Quality of Life ๐Ÿ›ยถ

We deployed various fixes and improvements to the rendering of article frontmatter and the respective article and project settings forms.

Jun 15, 2022 - Document Outlineยถ

You can now see the document outline, which shows all of the headers on the page. This can be accessed from the navigation and can toggle between all project documents and the list of headers on the document you are currently viewing. As a part of these changes you can also open/close the project thumbnail to give yourself more room to see the outline of long documents.

Bug fixes ๐Ÿ›ยถ

  • A bug that lost undo history when pasting into text input fields has been fixed.

Jun 7, 2022 - Minor changes & bug fixesยถ

UI Features ๐ŸŽจยถ

  • Tables are more compact
  • Code blocks has a more distinguished look
  • MyBinder and Notebook icons are now coloured when not hovered

Bug fixes ๐Ÿ›ยถ

  • fixed a bug causing tooltips fail to stick to anchor when scrolling

Jun 3, 2022 - Updates for Front matterยถ

We have made the updates for inputting front matter easier to do this directly from the block settings, based on feedback from early user testing in the past two days. We also added additional descriptions and links to all of the fields.

๐Ÿ› We have fixed a bug for section number that caused the number to be hidden while editing.

Curvenote CLI - Validation Errorsยถ

We have improved the client library to have more descriptive validation error messages and warnings. These will help notify you as you are building your curvenote.yml.

Jun 1, 2022 - All the front matterยถ

Following through on recent DOI and article/notebook header section changes, we have added a number of different front matter fields.

You can now set the following metadata on your Articles, Notebooks and use project-wide settings to apply default metadata across the contents of your project in one go.

The available metadata now aligns with that on curve.space and is documented in detail in our documentation here: https://docs.curvenote.com/web/frontmatter

Most metadata is displayed in the new header section on articles and notebooks:

And can be set both in the Article / Notebook settings (available from the โ€ฆ menu)

and from the Project settings, Frontmatter section.

๐Ÿ› Quality of Lifeยถ

Other fixes and improvements include:

  • Authors and affiliations can now be set or modified without having the edit & save the article. They are accessible from the Article/Notebook Settings dialog on a new tab.
  • Drag and drop functionality on the authorโ€™s list has been improved.
  • Move up/down arrows have been added to items in the Author list, to allow reordering without drag and drop.
  • Most popular licenses for content and code have been moved to the top of the license list.

May 31, 2022 - Site Analyticsยถ

We have added the ability to add analytics (google & plausible) to your curve.space site. See more in the docs:

This is completed by adding a config option to your curvenote.yml of site.analytics for either google: or plausible:. In the google: case, this is your Tracking ID for plausible: this is your domain property.

๐Ÿ› Curvenote Client Bug Fixesยถ

  • The curvenote pull now finishes reliably before a curvenote start

May 24, 2022 - Site Deployments & UI Improvementsยถ

We have released changes that allow you to deploy any curve.space site to a domain that your team owns or a domain with a - separated โ€œsubsiteโ€, for example username-subsite.curve.space. This allows you to deploy multiple subdomains for projects, and in the near future stitch them together on a different site.

API Tokens ๐Ÿ—ƒ๏ธยถ

We have improved the New API Token user interface that is clearer that you have to copy your token before leaving the page.

Bug Fixes ๐Ÿ›ยถ

  • Inline math no longer inherits bold, italic or superscript inside of a math node. Previously the export for LaTeX\LaTeX would be $\textbf{A}$, this is now no longer written inside of inline math.

May 20, 2022 - DOIs ๐Ÿ”—ยถ

We are continuing to expand our front matter capabilities! and have just added DOIs to Articles and Notebooks with the same Project level overrides that we see on our other front matter fields. So now you can easily add your DOi to your article or notebook, and that will be visible to collaborators on Curvenote and (as with all front matter) will propagate to your curve.space site when you deploy.

May 17, 2022 - Licenses ๐Ÿ“œยถ

You can now apply licenses to your articles, notebooks and projects by selecting a license from the lists of Open Source Initiative approved licenses available. These will be displayed as badges in the header section of your articles and notebooks.

Licenses can be chosen for content, code or both, and by default, new articles and notebooks will inherit the licenses that are set in your project.

but this can be overridden in the Article or Notebook settings

May 16, 2022 - Reference managementยถ

Weโ€™ve made a number of improvements to the reference management dialog, which should make keeping references in sync with other sources and dealing with lots of references easier.

  • โน๏ธ References can now be deleted and removed from the project, allowing duplicate and un-needed references to be cleaned up - currently only project.owners can delete references.
  • โš ๏ธ citations that point to missing references are now marked as broken within articles and notebooks. This allows them to be easily identified and replaced.
  • ๐Ÿ› When the reference management window is first opened, it will fetch a complete list of references in the project from the server โ€” however it will now first show any loaded references immediately, whilst fetching new ones in the background.
  • ๐Ÿ› When switching between tabs in the reference manager, the full list of references will no longer be loaded each time โ€” instead, updates from the server will be fetched in the background.

May 12, 2022ยถ

We have released the first step in improvements to the โ€œheader sectionโ€ on articles and notebooks, along with improvements to the author selection UI - more to come on this in the next few days!

Projects now also contain author information, so you can define authors, affiliations etc on a project-wide basis, and set your articles and notebooks to use the project-wide information.

Project-wide settings can be found in the new โ€œFront Matterโ€ section in the project settings dialog. By default, new articles and notebooks will have the โ€œUse Project Authorsโ€ checkbox checked.

Other changes ๐Ÿ› โœจ :

  • We have added Plain Text, JSON and YAML modes to code blocks
  • We have restored the border on inline code blocks
  • The date of the first article in a new project is now set correctly

May 4, 2022 - Quality of Life ๐Ÿ›ยถ

Fixes for:

  • Some citations could appear with the wrong date (year-1) in GMT+N timezones. [issue]
  • Leading newlines and empty paragraphs in table cells would cause problems on export [issue]
  • Some HTML tags (hr, br) were not handled properly on export [issue]

May 3, 2022 DOI Search fixes ๐Ÿ›ยถ

Our DOI based search for adding references has been down, but is now fixed and DOI based search is again available via the reference management dialog.

Link cards can now include external links, and the thumbnail title and description are shown! Here is an example of a recent paper in eLife:

Notebook Upload Bug fixes ๐Ÿ›ยถ

We released an update to our API that fixes upload issues around HTML inside of the markdown cells.

Apr 26, 2022 Curvenote Blogยถ

We have moved our Curvenote blog over to using our own publishing infrastructure, which means that it has moved to a subdomain: https://blog.curvenote.com

The site is super fast to load, and can handle all of the writing that we can throw at it, including references, figures, equations, and more. Our previous blogging seemed pretty constrained and really forced us to copy-and-paste content around the place, which didnโ€™t feel right.

Stay tuned for more updates on our new publishing infrastructure over the coming month! ๐Ÿš€

We have added cards that you can now use to link to pages in your Curvenote project.

For example, you can now link to other pages in this project:

To create a card, use the [[ syntax to link to an article or notebook, and then use the dropdown to change from a Link view to a Card view. ๐ŸŽ‰ .

Feature Improvementsยถ

  • The MyST Markdown export is now compliant with the MyST Spec. We will have a lot more to say about this soon! ๐Ÿš€

Apr 1, 2022 - Notebook Improvements ๐Ÿ“’ยถ

  • Syntax highlighting has been re-enabled
  • Improvements to styling and layout
  • Jupyter text & stream outputs are rendered as plain text
Referencesยถ
  1. Cockett, R. (2022). Future of Research Communication &amp; Collaboration. 10.5281/ZENODO.6476040