We’ve been hard at work preparing the DocumentCloud Beta for more and more newsrooms, and part of that is porting over existing functionality they rely on. Today, we’re excited to share a revamped suite of note and page sharing tools, including the ability to embed specific pages and notes within articles.

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Sharing with the DocumentCloud Beta

One of DocumentCloud’s most powerful and visible features is sharing documents and notes. Embed your document in your article or website. Share the link to a note within your document. Tweet out a specific page. Now with the DocumentCloud Beta there are sharing options to encompass a wide range of use cases. The new embeds are lightweight, mobile responsive, and faster/more widely compatible than in-browser PDF viewers.

Sharing Options

Once you have a document open on the DocumentCloud Beta, it’s easy to share. Click on the “Share” action in the right sidebar to access options for sharing links and creating embeds. (If the sidebar is not visible, clicking on the three horizontal lines in the top-right will expand it.)

At this point, if your document is not yet public, you will get a dialog confirming you want to proceed (see “Making your document public” below). If your document is already public or you choose to proceed, there are three different share options to choose from (each will be outlined in more depth):

• Entire document: This is the most common share option. Share the entire document to embed or send a link to the full document viewer. It’s essentially the default view when you open a document.

• Specific page: Link or embed a single page of the document. This is useful for highlighting an excerpt. Public notes within a page will be visible.

• Specific note: Link or embed a note within a document. This option is ideal for emphasizing a region of a page and adding commentary or insight.

Sharing the entire document

Document embeds are a versatile way to share documents. Many news websites already use DocumentCloud embeds to share primary source documents in their news articles. The document embed has a minimal, clean look but is very functional, allowing viewers to browse a full document as well as search its contents.

After selecting the document share option in the share dialog, you will see a few buttons, some HTML code, and preview window. The buttons at the top — embed, link, and Twitter — allow you to specify your desired share type.

The embed share type produces code that can be added to any website to display the full document viewer. The link option will give you a URL that links to the full document. The Twitter option begins composing a tweet that links to the document.

Sharing a specific page

Sometimes it is useful to highlight a specific page without embedding the whole document. The single page option allows you to embed just that page. The page embed shows an image of the page along with caption text that links back to the entire document. Public notes within the embedded page will be shown as clickable yellow rectangles. The link option for the specific page share type will produce a URL to the full document scrolled to the relevant page.

When you create a page embed, the dialog will default to sharing the page that was currently visible when you clicked “Share” in the sidebar.

If you want to embed another page, you can by selecting “Other page” and inputting the desired page number.

Sharing a specific note

Notes are an effective way to point out specific regions within the document. Note embeds can be used to highlight sentences, paragraphs, images, or any rectangular excerpt. Note embeds display the note’s title and content, allowing you to add your voice to why that part of the document may be salient.

After you select the note share option, you will be presented with an action to select the note you want to share. The document will dim to highlight the notes, and you can scroll through and select your pick.

Once you select a note, you have the option to embed it or link to it. The embed option shows the highlighted note with captions for the note’s title and content that link back to the full document. The link option redirects to the full document, scrolled so that the note is visible and open.

Making your document public

If your document is not yet public, you will get a dialog box prompting if you would like to make it public. Documents can be shared and embedded even if they are not public, but only with people who have access. Most share use cases revolve around making your document public to be able to share it with anyone on the internet, but if you are intending to only share with explicit collaborators you can hit “Leave as is” to continue.

Get your newsroom started with the DocumentCloud Beta

Ready for faster processing and advanced search? Newsrooms can request access for testing the DocumentCloud Beta to see if it meets their needs, opt to get their system entirely upgraded sooner, or delay access until later in the cycle as needed.

• If your newsroom already uses DocumentCloud and you’d like some users to have access to the Beta for testing and evaluation purposes, email us with the subject line “Beta Access.”
• If your newsroom already uses DocumentCloud and you’re ready to migrate your entire newsroom to the new platform, including old documents, email us with the subject line “Beta Migration.”
• If you’d like to delay your migration until at least a certain date, fill out this form as soon as possible and our team will note your delay request as well as offer any support we can to help you prepare.
• If you work in a newsroom and don’t currently use DocumentCloud, apply here.

See an overview of the DocumentCloud Beta in the video below; note that it covers an older version of the site and new features are released regularly.

Image via Wikimedia Commons