Seven changes, all aimed at the same thing: think about the procedure, not
about blocks.
Live preview beside the editor, rendered with the SAME component readers get,
so what an author sees is what will be published - a separate preview
implementation would drift within a month.
Formatting buttons wrap the selection, so nobody needs to know the markup is
Markdown. New blocks and pasted images land AFTER the block being worked on
rather than at the bottom of the document, which removes the scroll-back that
made adding a screenshot mid-guide annoying.
Enter in a list makes the next item and focuses it, the way every other list in
every other tool behaves; backspace on an already-empty item removes it and
steps back up. Typing a ten-item checklist no longer needs the mouse.
Templates, because the blank page is the real barrier to somebody writing a
procedure down at all. The shapes are lifted from the KB articles the team
already writes, so guides written here read like the ones written before them.
Autosave on a three-second debounce with an honest status line, safe precisely
because the server dedups on content - an autosave that changed nothing writes
no version. Leaving with unsaved work now asks first.
CLIPBOARD: the code block no longer writes to the clipboard. A page that
programmatically copies a shell command is the exact shape of a ClickFix attack,
where malware plants a command in your clipboard and talks you into pasting it
into Run - and uBlock Origin blocked ours, correctly, because it was writing
PowerShell on click. The button now SELECTS the code and says to press Ctrl+C:
same convenience, decision back with the person, and nothing for security
tooling to object to.
AUTOCORRECT is on for prose and off for code and table cells. A code block that
autocorrects produces a guide telling somebody to run a command that does not
work - smart quotes replacing a straight one, an autocapitalised cmdlet - and it
still LOOKS right to the author. The person at the bay gets the syntax error.
Printing a dark-mode page lays a full page of toner down for the background and
knocks the text out of it in white. On a shopfloor printer that is a cartridge
for a handful of guides, and the result is harder to read than the plain
version. Somebody would have found this the expensive way.
The theme tokens are redefined for print only, in an unscoped block because
overriding them has to reach :root. Every guide element already renders through
those variables rather than literal colours, so this is a dozen lines instead of
a rewrite - the same discipline that made dark mode work without dark-mode code.
Backgrounds are dropped rather than printed grey: a callout is identified by its
rule and its heading, which cost nothing. Checkboxes print EMPTY even where they
are ticked on screen, because a printed guide is a worksheet somebody carries to
the bay, and one person's progress is not part of the procedure. The footer
gains the print date beside the version, so a stale copy pinned to a noticeboard
can be spotted.
Also corrects the model and migration found by running this against a real
database rather than SQLite: BaseModel contributes createddate, modifieddate and
isactive to every table and the migration never created them, so the first read
failed on unknown columns; the model had also declared duplicate timestamps on
top, now removed with the API field names kept stable. And the slug is 191
characters, not 300 - it is UNIQUE-indexed, MySQL caps an index key at 767
bytes, and utf8mb4 is 4 bytes per character.
The knowledgebase plugin is a link registry - a description, a URL and some
keywords pointing at a document held somewhere else. That leaves the documents
themselves as HTML files on a share: no search, no history, no way to know
whether the copy pinned to a noticeboard is current, and no way for a technician
to tick off where they are.
A guide is stored as an ordered list of typed blocks rather than a blob of
HTML, because three of the four things this feature exists for depend on it. A
tickable step needs a stable id to be remembered; dark mode needs semantic
markup rather than pasted colours; and print needs to know where a step begins
so it does not split one across a page. Free HTML gives none of that and lets
pasted styling fight the theme.
Inline text is a restricted Markdown subset - bold, italic, inline code, links,
line breaks - escaped BEFORE formatting, so nothing an author pasted can reach
the DOM as markup. No fonts, sizes or colours: emphasis is semantic and the
theme decides how it looks. That is what makes a guide written next year match
one written today, and dark mode work without an author thinking about it.
DRAFTS AND VERSIONS. The guide row is the working copy; every save that changes
something writes an immutable revision; and a separate pointer says which
revision READERS get. Without that pointer, editing a live procedure changes it
under a technician who is halfway through following it. Publishing promotes an
existing revision rather than snapshotting, so a publish with unsaved edits
cannot ship a version nobody reviewed. Restoring writes a new revision with old
content, so the record of what people were told in between survives.
Saves dedup on a content hash covering title, summary, tags and blocks, so an
autosave that changed nothing writes no version - otherwise the history fills
with identical entries and hides the three edits that mattered.
Progress lives in the browser, not the database: shopfloor PCs share a login, so
per-user ticks would show one technician's progress to the next person on that
bay, which reads as "already done". Keyed by guide and version, because step 4
of version 3 is not step 4 of version 2.
Five permissions, and the split between edit and publish is the point: a
technician can write a procedure up while somebody else decides it is fit for
the floor. create-without-edit works too - an author may edit their own guide
until it is published, after which other people are following it.
