Basic Working Procedures > Editing Topic Files

As a normal documentation author you do not need to know anything about XML to get all the benefits from using Help & Manual. Familiarity with XML is really only needed for users who want to generate their topic files from their own applications automatically in XML format and for performing complex search and replace operations directly on your project files with an external editor.

Key Information

XML editing is for experts only. Although XML looks a little like HTML it is actually very different and does not tolerate even the smallest syntax error.

The XML Source tab is a text editor with syntax highlighting. You can copy, cut and paste and both search and spell-checking are supported (right-click in the XML editor window for options).

If you want you can also copy the entire contents of the XML Source to a separate file – this is effectively the same as exporting the topic to an external XML file with Topics > Save Topic to File.

You can only edit individual topics in the XML Source tab. To perform global search and replace operations you must edit the source files of your project directly with an external editor capable of performing search and replace operations on multiple files. If you select another topic directly while the XML Source tab is active you will be returned to the Page Editor tab automatically.

Help & Manual's XML format is open and fully documented. Full documentation is available in the file Helpman_XML_ref.chm which you can find in the Help & Manual program directory.

If you use Help & Manual Professional you can save your projects in as uncompressed XML files with an .hmxp file as the main project file (this file is also an XML file).

If you observe the syntax rules of the Help & Manual XML Language you can edit these files directly, either with a normal text editor or with a specialized XML editor. If you have an editor that supports multiple-file search and replace you can also perform search and replace operations on your entire project that are not possible directly in Help & Manual itself. For example, you can use an editor that supports regular expressions to perform very complex manipulations on the text and the source code.

WARNING: Caution when editing XML files in MS Word

Recent versions of MS Word can edit XML but you need to exercise extreme caution. When you save XML files some versions of Word will change the source code and add Microsoft's own version of XML, making the files unusable in Help & Manual. Please perform tests to make sure that this is not happening before doing any XML editing with Word.

Help & Manual can only process XML files conforming to the Help & Manual XML Language. These can be produced by Help & Manual itself or generated by other programs that conform to the language schema specifications. Documentation of the updated version of the Help & Manual XML Language used in Help & Manual 5 is going to be released as soon as possible.