Publishing > Publishing Your Projects

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

The instructions in this topic are for publishing your projects to a single output format manually. See Publishing Tasks for instructions on how to

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

2.Select the output format from the drop-down list at the top. This will display the options for that format.

•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.Configure your output options, then click on Publish Now 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 a window. This window contains controls with which you can search, copy, print or save the report to an external HTML file.

Install the free Adobe Digital Editions reader
Before attempting to publish an ePub eBook visit the Adobe Digital Editions download page install the Digital Editions eBook reader. This is essential because without it you will not be able to view your ePub eBooks after you have created them.

Check the requirements and restrictions for ePub eBooks
Not all features supported in some other formats are possible in ePub eBooks. Among other things you have to plan for small, narrow book pages where virtually no "layout" is possible. Please study the information on ePub eBooks in the Configuring Your Output and Publishing Formats and Configuration Settings chapters before proceeding.

For test purposes you can publish only the topics that are currently selected in the Table of Contents pane (TOC). If exported topics contain links to topics not included in your output you may want to take steps to handle this. See Preventing dead links for instructions on how to deal with this.

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 File menu or the Project tab.

3.Select the output format, then select Selected TOC items only at the bottom of the Publish page. You can combine this with other include options if you like.

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

In the Microsoft HTML Help (CHM) and WebHelp (HTML) 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 from your project that defines 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 or Server 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 File menu or the Project tab.

2.Then select the skin file you want to apply in the Select Skin section and click on Publish Now 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:

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

The topics and content tagged with matching include options in your project will be included ore excluded from your published output depending you your selections. The option for the current output format is activated automatically and should normally 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:

Publishing WebHelp is almost the same as publishing 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 WebHelp project can consist of hundreds of files! 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 publishing. 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 distribute.

Clearing the output folder makes sure that no old 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 may cause problems.

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.

Help & Manual activates its own local web server when you publish to WebHelp. This makes it possible to test your WebHelp output with the same functionality as on a web server without having to upload your files to the server. However, note that this server is HTTP only. It does not include support for server-side scripting languages like PHP. If you activate the PHP or ASP versions of WebHelp search you must use a full web server with PHP or ASP support to test the search functionality.

When you are publishing 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 publishing. 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.

•PHP and ASP search require a full web server for testing.
Help & Manual's local web server activated when you publish does not include server-side scripting support. If you activate the PHP or ASP versions of WebHelp search you must use a full web server with PHP or ASP support to test the search functionality.

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 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 2008 and 2010 (MS Help 2.0 and 3.0) 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 programming components in Visual Studio .NET. It cannot be used for documenting normal application programs and if you are not a VS .NET programmer you don't need to know anything about it!

Support for Visual Studio Help is only available in the Professional and Server versions of Help & Manual.

Publishing manually

Publishing manually

Filtering with include options:

Filtering by "Complete" status: