Fidus Writer 3.5 has finally arrived and it brings with it a number of features that will be really important to most writers.

The top three new features are:

Track Changes: Finally you can make change suggestions rather than making all your changes become part of the document immediately. The feature works the same way as they do in the most common word processors, and of course tracked changes works in combination with real time collaboration.

Improved PDF and print export: Fidus Writer 3.5 uses Vivliostyle for print. Until now we used our own solution which was not nearly as advanced as what Vivliostyle offers. Vivliostyle has been developed by a number of highly professional Tokyo-based developers since 2014 as a professional way to turn HTML + CSS into PDFs using browser technology. Read our interview with Shinyu Muhakami, the Vivliostyle Project Leader, on what it is all about and where Vivliostyle is moving.

Comment collaboration: When you write a comment within a document, you can now tag one of your collaborators and the collaborator will be notified about the new comment. Comments can also be assigned to individual users and comments can be resolved (and unresolved). Together this means that comments can now be used to organize the work on a document between collaborators. 
 

And there is a lot more. As always, you can check out all the changes on our server: https://app.fiduswriter.org and that is probably the best way to discover the new features.

For technical details, check the official change log here!

These were some of the largest features that Fidus Writer was lacking. The release includes the last installment of contributions added to Fidus Writer by the Opening Scholarly Communications in the Social Sciences (OSCOSS) project. Please let us know what you think of these updates.

With these additions, we are a lot closer to being able to offer a paid-for hosted version of Fidus Writer in the next few months, so stay tuned for further news on that front!