Publishing > Publishing Your Projects

Once you have made all your preparations and set your configuration options for the output format you are using compiling is basically just a question of selecting Publish and choosing the output format.

1.	Save your project, then select Publish in the Project tab.

2.	Select the output format from the list on the left. Some of the options displayed in the dialog will change depending on the format you choose.

•	For details on the options see the reference to the Publish Help Project dialog.

3.	Check the Output File: field. In most cases the program will automatically publish to the project folder, using the project name as the file name. You can change both the output folder and the file name if you want and Help & Manual will remember this change next time you publish.

4.	Select the output options and click on OK to publish. This can take a couple of minutes with very large projects.

A report on the publish process including any errors and a list of the files and/or folders you need to include when you distribute your help to your users is displayed in an external viewer window. This window contains controls with which you can save the report to an external HTML file if you want.

For test purposes you can publish only the topics that are currently selected in the Table of Contents pane (TOC). Note that this will result in dead links in topics that contain links to topics which are not included in your output!

1.	Select the topics you want to publish in the TOC pane. You can use Ctrl+Click and Shift+Click to select multiple topics out of order and sequences of topics. Selecting chapters automatically selects all the chapters' sub-topics.

2.	Select Publish in the Application Menu or the Project tab.

3.	Select the output format, then select Selected Topics in the Include Options: box. The box will be highlighted in yellow to remind you that only selected topics will be included in your output.

4.	Select your other publish options, then click on OK to publish.

In HTML-based output formats you can apply a completely different layout and appearance to your published output by choosing a "skin" file in the Publish dialog. Skins include everything that define the general appearance of your output; your variable definitions, HTML templates, text and table styles and your Baggage Files.

Help & Manual comes with some sample skins in the \Skins folder in the Help & Manual program directory. If you have the Professional version of the program you can also save your own projects as skins to apply their appearance to other projects without additional formatting.

See Transforming your output with skins for full details.

1.	Select Publish in the Application Menu or the Project tab normally.

2.	Then select the skin file you want to apply in the Compile with skin: field and click on OK to publish.

You can also filter your output by topic status and with conditional output include options. For more information see Conditions and Customized Output in the More Advanced Procedures section and Publish Help File in the Reference section.

Filtering with include options:

With the exception of the Selected Topics option (see above) the Include Options settings in the Publish dialog are only relevant if you are actually using conditional output to control which topics and content are included in your published output.

•	In the Include Options: section of the Publish dialog select the options matching the content you want to include in your output.

Only topics and content tagged with matching include options in your project will be included in your published output. The option for the current output format should always be selected.

Filtering by "Complete" status:

This is only relevant if you have actually applied topic status to topics in the TOC. It allows you to exclude all topics that do not have the status "Complete" from your output, thus automatically excluding any topics that are unfinished or require review.

Select the option Topic Status: Complete Only below the Include Options box in the Publish dialog:

The Quick Launch function publishes your output and displays it without displaying the publish Help File dialog.

This function automatically uses the last publish settings you used with when you published with the publish dialog. It is thus advisable to publish to the selected format manually at least once before using Quick Launch.

1.	Click on the lower part of the Publish tool in Project > Project to display the Quick Launch menu:

2.	Then just select the output format you want to output to. Your project will be published and displayed automatically as soon as the publish process is finished.

Compiling Webhelp is almost the same as compiling any other format. However, since you are actually creating a website consisting of a large number of individual files there are a couple of additional points you need to bear in mind:

Always publish Webhelp to its own folder, which should preferably be empty. A large project can consist of several hundred files in this format! (The program will suggest creating a folder called \HTML inside your project directory, which is a good choice.)

When you publish to Webhelp you can the use the Delete all files in output folder option to clear the output folder before compiling. You don't need to use this during normal working but it is a good idea to select it before creating a build that you are going to publish.

Clearing the output folder makes sure that no files for topics that you have deleted are included in your output unnecessarily. In addition to taking up space these files will also be indexed and will appear in the full-text search (see below).

Clearing the output folder is also essential when you change the name of the project, as this changes the names of a number of important files that are components of your Webhelp. If you don't clear the folder the old files will remain in place and will be included in the index.

You don't need to worry about the timestamps of your output HTML files when you clear the output folder. The the HTML file timestamps are always set to the last time the topic was edited, not the time when the project was published.

Microsoft Internet Explorer now displays a yellow warning bar when you open any HTML files containing scripting on your local machine. You can disable this warning by activating the option Enable local testing for MS Internet Explorer in the Publish dialog.

Your Webhelp files will then open normally in Internet Explorer, without the yellow warning bar. If you plan to deploy your Webhelp for installation on local computers you can leave this setting activated for your production output if you want.

Important: Note that file links do not work when this option is activated. You should also deactivate it again before deploying your help on your server as this rather messy Microsoft "kludge" may have unexpected results when it is used online!

When you are compiling the new Webhelp with full-text search it's important to understand that the search index is not generated from your project files or from the files on your server. It is generated from the HTML files on your local computer, after the HTML files have been generated.

•	If the output directory contains any other HTML files these will be included in the index. To prevent this do not place any other files in the output directory. Since the index is generated locally you can upload other files to your server separately, then they will not be included in the index.

•

Outdated HTML files will be included in the index if you don't delete them.
To ensure that the HTML files of outdated topics are not included in the index use the Delete all files in output folder option in the Publish dialog to delete the contents of the output directory before compiling. This will not cause problems with the timestamps of topic files that have not been changed – the HTML file timestamps are always set to the last time the topic was edited, not the time when the project was published.

Normally, you cannot publish help projects written Asian languages on non-Asian versions of Windows because the necessary language settings don't match. However, if you just want to do a quick test publish and don't have a Windows version in the matching Asian language there is a configuration setting that will allow you to do this.

•	Go to View > Program Options > Compilers and activate the option Tolerant handling of Asian languages.

Some features may not work correctly in the resulting help file in Winhelp and HTML Help if the languages of your Windows version and the help file don't match (Search, Keyword Index) but you will be able to complete the compilation, which is sufficient for testing.

Please note that Visual Studio Help (MS Help 2.0) is a special case. Please see the special Visual Studio Help chapter in the More Advanced Procedures section for details.

Visual Studio Help is a special help format that is only used for documenting third-party programming components designed for integration in Visual Studio .NET. It cannot be used for documenting normal application programs and if you are not a VS.NET system programmer you don't need to know anything about it!

Support for Visual Studio Help is only available in the Professional version of Help & Manual.