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I Should Be Writing 2.0
Zoho Writer Update : Issues related to Safari browser fixed
We had a minor Zoho Writer update in which the issue of document content not getting displayed in Safari Browser on a Mac has been fixed. Users who have reported this particular issue in the past couple of days can try accessing Zoho Writer documents in their Safari browser and the content should come up fine for editing in the Writer editor.
Zoho Writer provides limited support for Safari browser as of now and hence some of the feature may behave inconsistently in it. We suggest Mac Users to access Zoho Writer on Firefox 2.0+ browser versions for a better experience. Full support for Safari browser will be provided in our next series of updates. It’s in the works right now.
‘Open IT Online’ integrates Zoho
Open IT Online is a Firefox extension that allows to open and edit documents and images from everywhere. Thanks to this extension, you will be able to open several types of documents directly in Firefox using online services (such as Zoho) without needing any software to be installed. In other words, it adds an option to your Firefox “Open With” dialog to let you open Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more file types in the Zoho suite, Google Docs, ThinkFree Viewer & others. You can configure defaults for every file type - nice and convenient for fans of online editing. Open IT Online is a free download and it works wherever Firefox 2 or 3 does.
Here’s more screenshots & a nice video of how to use Open IT Online to view documents online with Zoho. Install the Open IT Online Firefox add-on to view/edit files directly online without downloading them.
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Syncplicity Integrates Zoho
Syncplicity, a document synchronization tool integrated Zoho into their application recently. This Sync tool lets you synchronize your documents from your desktop (PC-only currently) to their web application.
If you have Syncplicity installed on your computer, you can right-click on a document on your desktop and choose the ‘Edit in Zoho’ option for editing your document. This opens up a window with the Zoho document editor. When the ‘Save’ button is hit in Zoho editor, it saves the file to your local folder and also your Syncplicity account, thus keeping your document in sync. This works with Zoho Writer & Zoho Sheet Apps now with Zoho Show to follow.
Similar editing option is also available in their online application to edit documents online. After you save the changes, the documents are saved on their servers.
And here’s a nice screencast done by the Syncplicity team, demonstrating the integration.
We’d like to thank Syncplicity for integrating Zoho. Our other API Partners are here. If you have integrated Zoho into your application, do let us know so that we can profile you here and list you as a partner in our partners page.
Sharing Options in Zoho
Here’s a question (with variations of it) we get from the first-timers of Zoho.
I have a document/spreadsheet/presentation that is to be emailed every time to a ‘prospect/client’ or to my ‘boss/peers/co-students/teacher for review’. In the former instance, “I don’t want the doc to stay in my prospect/client’s inbox (as documents soon become obsolete)”. And in the latter instance, “I and my boss/peers/co-students/teacher end up having multiple versions of the file, adding to my/their email clutter”. How can Zoho help me here?
Well, this is one of the fundamental problems solved by Zoho. Let’s say you have a .doc or .odt file. You have a few options in Zoho that would make things easier for you.
- Import your document into Zoho Writer
- Share it by giving the email addresses of your prospect/client, boss,peers, co-students or teacher. They will receive an email with a HTML link (URL) which they can click on to view the document. They can edit the document too, directly inside Zoho Writer if you have given them proper permission
- Make the document public (if it doesn’t contain anything confidential) and give the URL to anyone who would like to view it.
- Upload your document to Zoho Viewer. You get a URL which you email to everyone concerned & they can view it. Use the Zoho Viewer option judiciously - there’s an option where you can choose the URL to expire after a certain time period
Here’s a short screencast (our first attempt. bear with the video/audio quality please!) explaining the above options. For better clarity, view the video in Full Screen mode.
There are other advantages too.
- No compatibility issues that come with using different types and versions of desktop software
- You can keep updating your document and the latest version’s available for your prospect, client or whoever you want it to be viewed
- Live collaboration is possible - you and your collaborators can work on a document or spreadsheet in real-time
- And, you can chat too (using the embedded Zoho Chat)
Use Zoho. Say NO to email attachments.
Zoho for iPhone - Redesigned
We just rolled out a new design for Zoho on iPhone. You can play with it @ mobile.zoho.com (or iZoho.com). The new design introduces a tabbed interface for navigation between Zoho Apps. Currently, Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show & Creator are supported in this new interface. We plan to add more apps and more functionality to this new version.
Once you login, the Zoho tab shows the recent 5 documents from each Zoho app. You’ll be able to view your personal and shared documents under the respective application tabs.
We are looking forward to your feedback on this new redesign.
Maximizing the Zoho Writer Editor
Here’s a query we often get from our Zoho Writer users :
How do I increase/maximize the editing (working) area in Zoho Writer? (or) How do I make Zoho Writer behave like a desktop word processor?
You have quite a few ways to get more writing area.
- The left/right margins are 10% each by default. Minimize them (you can easily drag them) to get more space
- Click on the Maximize Editor icon
, found next to the Delete button at the top-left of the Zoho Writer toolbar. You will find the left panel that lists your documents give way to more editing area. You can click on the same icon (which is now Minimize Editor) to return to the default editor. - Click on Options -> View Buttons. You can uncheck some of the button groups that you don’t typically use. This depends on your word processing needs
- Click on the F11 button (for both Firefox & IE). This will result in the tool & menu bars at the top / bottom disappear and the screen area getting larger
- Use Mozilla Prism. Since each web application runs in its own window, Prism mimics a desktop-like experience. You can combine Prism with the above options to get more screen area
Want to tell us more on ways you are using Zoho Writer? Please feel free to leave your comments.
Equations, LaTeX and Vanishingly Small Probabilities
As we announced yesterday, Equation Editor (with LaTeX support) is the latest feature in Zoho Writer. This one has deep personal relevance to me. My first “programming language”, in the sense that I wrote a lot of code, was actually LaTeX. It is a programming langauge for accurate typesetting of documents, that in many ways anticipated developments like HTML/CSS.
As a graduate student at Princeton, I spent countless hours writing and rewriting papers for publication using LaTeX, first with inputs from my advisor, and later from anonymous reviewers at publications like The IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Of course, my entire PhD thesis was written in LaTeX as well. The most important aspect of LaTeX I loved was its easy facility with equations. You would type in something like (Ampere’s Law - thank you Wikipedia!)
\Delta \times \mathbf {B} = \mu_0 \mathbf {J} + \mu_0 \epsilon_0 \frac{\partial \mathbf {E}}{\partial t}
and the LaTeX compiler would generate
Or the integral form of Ampere’s Law:
\oint_{\partial S} \mathbf {B} . d \mathbf {l} = \mu_0 I_S + \mu_0 \epsilon_0 \frac{d {\Phi}_{E,S}}{dt}
It was pure magic to see the compiler generate such beautiful forms. I spent four years of life with equations like that - pretty much every section, every page in my thesis had them. As a graduate student, I used to wonder if such equations could be generated via a friendly user interface - keep in mind that MS-DOS still ruled the world at that time and graduate students like me had Sun workstations. I myself had little interest in software at that time (I was going to prove theorems, so I looked down on programming as a lowly activity!) so never pursued that thought further. If someone had predicted at that time that I would end up founding a software company one of whose key products is a word processor, and LaTeX would play a role in it, I would have just laughed the idea off as absurd or in technical terms, “of vanishingly small probability”, a phrase that sticks in mind after seeing those epsilons and deltas (or \epsilon’s \ and \ \delta’s in LaTeX terminology!). I used to practically dream in epsilons and deltas during that period - so many of the mathematical proofs depended on them being close to but not quite zero.
I am very happy to see the Equation Editor in Zoho Writer give shape to that user interface idea. There is a lot more potential in typesetting using LaTeX like ideas, and you will see us pursue them in due course.
Thinking back, what is surprising to me now is how little of my PhD I remember. I retrieved my PhD thesis from its long-forgotten closet, dusted it off, and it is all Greek to me. I can scarcely even believe it is my own work I am staring at. I used to be really, really passionate about proving theorems, so it seems even stranger that I would just completely abandon it. The only thing I would have gotten right with all my PhD training was to recognize that vanishingly small probability events can still happen.
Zoho Writer : Import from Google Docs & Equation Editor (LaTeX) support
Today’s Zoho Writer update introduces three key functionalities
- Import Documents from Google Docs to Zoho Writer
- Equation Editor
- LaTeX Export
1. Import Documents from Google Docs to Zoho Writer
After we accepted Google and Yahoo! sign-in to Zoho (and Google Apps accounts sign-in), we were asked to implement import capability to Zoho. We have added this feature in this update. And now you can import your Google Docs into Zoho Writer. Here are the steps :
- Login to your Google Docs account & choose the documents that you need to export to Zoho
- Click on More actions -> Save as HTML (zipped) to your desktop
- In Zoho Writer, click on Import -> Import Google Docs, select the zipped file path and click Import
- All the Google Docs documents in the zip file will be imported into your Zoho Writer account & will be displayed in the left panel
We certainly don’t want to trap your information in Zoho. We will soon provide a mass Export option to take your documents to other services.
2. Equation Editor
As you may know, a significant % of our users are students. We got a lot of requests from this user segment to build an Equation Editor into Zoho Writer. And Zoho Writer has it now.
You’ll see a new Equation Editor icon (last one in the second row of the toolbar) which brings up a simple UI to create your equations. If you are a LaTeX guru, type your equation away and we automatically generate an image of the equation on the right. If you are not a LaTeX expert (like me), you can simply select the equation symbols with your mouse and we automatically build the equation for you. Once done, the equation image is inserted into your document.
After you insert your equation, if you want to make any changes to it, right click on the image and select Edit Equation.
3. LaTeX Export
As you see in the above slide show, we support LaTeX, the document markup language widely used by mathematicians, scientists, engineers and scholars in academia. We have a new option in Zoho Writer under Export, to save such files involving equations in LaTeX format as well.
Try the new features in Zoho Writer now & we will be glad knowing your comments.
Page Setup & Page View Options in Zoho Writer
Zoho Writer provides you with quite a few page setup options. For accessing them, click on the Page Setup icon 
(third from left, first row of the Zoho Writer toolbar). The pop-up window has 3 tabs marked General, Header & Footer.
In the General tab, you can set the font face, font size, page bg color, top/bottom & left/right margins, paper size, direction (those in the Middle-East can set right-to-left for Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu etc) & line spacing. All these properties can be set for each document by default. And if you want this to be applied to every new document you create, you can check the ‘Make it default for All New Documents‘ checkbox.
In the Header and Footer tabs you can choose what to display in the Left, Middle, Right areas of the Header/Footer sections of a document.
And the icon adjacent to Page Setup is Page View. Use it to see how your page will look while it’s printed - both width-wise & length-wise (where a page ends & the next one begins). The Page View is in Read Only mode currently & we will be extending this option to Edit mode soon.
Use the above options while drafting your documents in Zoho Writer & let us know in the comments below of how it went.
Zoho Writer Search Issue, Fix
We enabled a new indexer for searching group related documents on Saturday. As with search related features, the indexer was supposed to index over several days before the feature was officially unveiled. Unfortunately, we introduced a crucial bug in the new search system, which impacted one of our users on Sunday. The search results included 4 documents from other users (shared to their own unrelated groups). As soon as we got notified, we stopped the search subsystem and started a full investigation, which unearthed the bug in 3 hours.
We fixed the issue immediately after the root cause was identified.
While the fix was applied immediately, it was something we should not have let this slip in. It should have been caught in our quality assurance process. We sincerely apologize to the affected user, and all Zoho users as well.
We work hard at Zoho to keep the system functioning well. An error like this is very painful to us, and we take it very seriously. We will be even more vigilant in future. Please accept our humble apologies.
Huddle Integrates Zoho
Huddle combines group collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles. Huddle now integrated Zoho Applications for viewing and editing documents inside their application.
Huddle used our Remote API to integrate Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet. This allows Huddle users to create, view and edit documents, spreadsheets within their familiar interface respecting Huddle’s security, permissions and workflow rules.
We’d like to thank Huddle for integrating Zoho and are looking forward to more such integrations. All our API Partners are listed here.
eyeOS Integrates Zoho
Online Desktop vendor eyeOS integrated Zoho Suite into their application. Currently Zoho Writer and Sheet are integrated into eyeOS. Zoho Show will be integrated after we open up the APIs for creating presentations.
To use the Zoho Apps on eyeOS, you need to install eyeZohoSuite from eyeos-apps.org. Once you have it installed, you’ll be able to view your existing documents and spreadsheets from Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet respectively. This also lets you create new documents and spreadsheets as well. eyeOS plans to support opening Open Office documents soon with Zoho Apps going forward.
The following video gives you a quick overview of the integration.
We’d like to thank eyeOS for integrating Zoho. If you are planning to integrate Zoho into your application, please do let us know and we’ll be glad to help you. Other partners who integrated Zoho are listed here.