The Task Manager (button at upper right) is used to generate multiple output formats and project versions in a single operation. You can save "tasks" and reuse them to publish multiple versions and formats in one quick process. See Publishing Tasks - Automation for full details.

Publish multiple versions and formats with the Task Manager

Publish Format:

Select the format for your published documentation. You can choose any format supported by Help & Manual at any time. Any project can always be published to any format.

The options displayed in the Publish page depend on the publishing format selected.

Output file and path:

Where you want to generate your output and the name of the output file. By default Help & Manual uses your project directory and the project name. You can change this here whenever you like, however. When you do this the program makes all necessary internal changes automatically. Your setting is stored for your project and displayed the next time you publish.

You can use the browse button to navigate to a different output directory.

Include Options:

These options are used in combination with Help & Manual's conditional output features.  Topics and content that are "tagged" with the options you select here will be included in your output, those that don't match will be excluded from your output. Please study Conditions and Customized Output before using!

Current format:
By default the include option for the selected output format is preselected. If you also select other options you must leave the current format option selected, otherwise only the content matching the other options will be included.

Skin include options:
If you select a skin for publishing to WebHelp or HTML Help/CHM any include options stored in the skin will be displayed in a separate box. Skin authors often use these options for activating features available in the skin.

Publish selected TOC items only:

Displayed if one or more topics in the TOC are selected. Activating this option only outputs the topics currently selected in the TOC. Other include options can be used in combination with this option.

Publish topics with status "Complete" only:

Only exports topics with the status "complete" to your published output. This enables you to prevent topics that are not yet finished from being included in your output.

Important: This will only work if you are actually using topic status to mark your topics while working in the TOC.

Display file when complete:

Automatically displays the output file as soon as it has been generated, using the appropriate viewer.

Select Skin:

Allows you to select a .hmskin skin file to replace the entire design of a project while publishing. This allows you to apply a completely different layout and "branding" to your project with a single click. You can save the current project as a skin with Save As in the File menu.

Delete temporary files:

Selected by default. Normally all the source files generated to publish HTML Help are deleted. If you deselect this you can view the source files in the \~tmphtml directory, which you can find in your project directory.

Index page:

The default index page for WebHelp is index.html. You can change this here, along with the output path. This is not recommended, however. If you use the standard index.html name browsers will automatically display the help if the user just access the path, without an index file name. Help & Manual remembers your setting for the current project.

Select Skin:

Allows you to select a .hmskin skin file to replace the entire design of a project while publishing. This allows you to apply a completely different layout and "branding" to your project with a single click. You can save the current project as a skin with Save As in the File menu.

Delete all files in output folder:

Clears all the files in the output folder before publishing. Use this when you are producing a distribution build to ensure that the folder only contains the files related to the current version of your project. Otherwise the directory may contain HTML files for topics that you have already deleted in your project, left over from previous compiles. These files take up unnecessary space and are also indexed by the indexer and included in the full-text search function, which is something you want to avoid.

Always use this function if you change the title of your project as this also changes the names of all the output files associated with the full-text search function. If the old files are present the indexer may attempt to index them, which can cause errors.

Sub-folders: This option only deletes files in the output folder, it will not delete sub-folders.

Print manual template:

Selects the .mnl print manual template file to be used to generate the PDF file. This template file defines the PDF layout, generates the print-style table of contents and the index and adds a number of additional pages and other features like headers, footers, page numbers etc. You can edit your templates with the Print Manual Designer included with Help & Manual.

Highlight hotspots:

For testing only. Displays outlines around the hotspots and links in your PDF output. Dead links and hotspots to missing targets are also highlighted.

There are no special settings for iBooks®/ePub. The templates for this format are very strict and are generate automatically by Help & Manual. See Apple iBooks® - ePub for details on working with ePub.

Visual Studio Version:

Only relevant for documenting programming components in the Visual Studio .NET programming environment. Cannot be used for documenting normal user applications.

You can choose both Visual Studio 2008/HXS and Visual Studio 2010/MSHC formats. The HXS format requires installation of a special compiler from the Visual Studio 2008 .NET package. See Visual Studio Help for details.

Do not compile:

Visual Studio 2008/HXS only.

This is a special debugging option for Visual Studio Help 2008 (MS Help 2.0/HXS) only. Instead of publishing a finished .HXS file it generates a .HWProj  project file that you can open and compile manually in Visual Studio .NET. For details see About publishing VS Help.

Delete temporary files:

Selected by default. Normally all the source files generated to compile Visual Studio Help are deleted. If you deselect this you can view the source files in the \~tmphxs directory, which you can find in your project directory.

These formats have no special settings in the Publish dialog.