Scroll Office 2.1

Templates with Word Macros

It is now possible to upload Word templates with Word macros (don't mix them up with Confluence macros). Word macros are little pieces of functionality embedded in Word files which can make handling Word files a lot easier. For example:

• automatic formatting of certain elements, for example table formatting.
• to automate a series of tasks after export with Scroll like an automatic update of the table of contents (TOC) or the index.

Of course, there is also a switch to disable Word macros on space level or for the whole Confluence system.

More and more flexible Placeholders

A template for Scroll Office can contain so-called placeholders, which are replaced by Scroll Office before the template is outputted with the content from Confluence.

In Scroll Office 2.1 there are two new placeholders:

• The $scroll.metadata inserts metadata stored with the metadata plugin. |
• The $scroll.spacelogo inserts the space logo of the current space. This will make it possible to re-use a template for customer specific reports across different spaces, but still output a customer specific header.

Additionally, you can now develop custom placeholders and plug them into Scroll Office see below.

Index Generation

As Scroll Office improves we are also dedicated to better support advanced Word features. In Scroll Office 2.1 we have added support for index generation both from labels and added the new {scroll-indexterm} macro.

• Scroll will automatically add all labels as (invisible) index terms to the outputted word file. If an index is added either to the Word template (before export) or manually after a Word file has been exported from Confluence, Word will automatically pick up these index terms to generate an index.
• For full control over indexes generation Scroll Office provides the {scroll-indexterm} macro. It provides three parameters (primary, secondary and tertiary) to have multiple levels of key words. E.g.: This {scroll-indexterm:primary=Fruits|secondary=Apple|tertiary=MacIntosh} will be converted into something link this:
  
  

REST-style API for Automated Export

Did you want to automate Scroll Office from an external system? You it is now possible access Scroll Office now with a REST-style API trigger an export and download the resulting Word file from a remote system. For example:

• Use this in a build script to automatically create the documentation and package it in your software distribution
• Trigger Scroll Office to produce a daily version of your documentation.

To easily use that feature, Scroll Office output a Permalink on every export, which contains all information to automatically produce a Word export which the same export configuration as just exported:

Scroll API

We have seen that customers require additional customization of Scroll. These are the plugins modules:

• A PageSelectionStrategy define which pages to export,
• Postprocessors do custom processing of the content before creating the Word document, or
• Placeholders can be used in Word templates and get replaced during export, e.g. $scroll.title is a placeholder.

Scroll Office now offers an API and plugin types for these customizations. More Information in the Development Guide.

And more...

Also, we are happy that could implement a few more improvements, which you have suggested.

• Switch to en/disable heading promotion. Heading promotion is a way to avoid too many heading levels when exporting a tree of pages. However in some cases you might want to disable it and now there is a checkbox to toggle it.
• {scroll-tablelayout} macro. Use this macro to let Scroll set colum widths of a table in Word.
• Replace thumbnails with high-res images. If you use thumbnails on your Confluence pages, Scroll Office will now by default use the high-resolution images. There is a switch to disable it.
• Overwrite page titles. Page titles are limited in Confluence: they only allow certain characters and they have to be unique within a space. With the {scroll-pagetitle} macro you can define page titles, which do not comply with these constraints, and Scroll Office will output these page titles.

Fixed Issues

All together we 64 fixed issues from the Scroll Office JIRA.