Help & Manual 4.3 released

March 2007

We are glad to announce the release of Help & Manual 4.3! Version 4.3 is a relatively minor update but it brings valuable new features. PDF has been improved yet again and the navigation options for Browser-based Help have been improved quite significantly. Among other things you can now create 3-frame layouts directly for seamless integration in your own website.

Concurrent user licenses available

With version 4.3 and future updates, we offer an alternative concurrent user licensing model. If you own a single user license of Help & Manual, nothing changes at all.

But if you are running Help & Manual on a network with 20 users or more, the flexible concurrent user licensing model may suit your needs better. Please contact us for more information on concurrent licensing.

Download:

You can download the update from our download page.

New features in version 4.3

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Please note that the directory structure of the Samples and Templates folders has changed in Help & Manual 4.3. In addition to this, the program installer now automatically creates a folder for your Help & Manual projects inside your My Documents folder if this does not already exist (Documents in Vista).

The new structure is tidier and it is also necessary for Windows Vista, which has much stricter read and write permissions rules for folders and files inside the Program Files directory.

\Templates:

The Templates folder is still stored inside the Help & Manual program directory but it now has separate sub-folders for all the different template categories:

ebooks:

eBook viewer skins and language files for the eBook user interface.

hmx:	Project templates (.HMX). Currently contains the project template for Help & Manual's own help, complete with instructions for using the template in your own projects.

html:

HTML-related templates. Currently contains the language files for the user-interface for full-text search in Browser-based Help.

pdf:	Contains a selection of standard print manual templates (.MNL) for PDFs and printed manuals. If you want to use these templates as a basis for your own templates you should copy them to your project directory before editing them.

xml:	Contains the templates used for generating XML output and an INI file for use with SDL Trados (see below).

\Samples:

The Samples folder is now stored inside the new MyHelpAndManualProjects folder in your My Documents directory (Documents in Vista). This folder contains several useful tutorials and the complete source for Help & Manual's own help.

Export As...:

The new Export As... function in Impict's File menu makes it possible to export a version of your image in another format (for example to your project folder) and continue working on your .IPP image. Impict now automatically remembers the last Export As... and Save As... folders you used.

Drag & Drop:

You can now drag files directly to the Impict editing window from Windows Explorer.

Save with reduced colors:

Impict now has a new graphics library that significantly improves performance for saving images with reduced colors. You can now reduce your images to 256 colors for minimum size and still get great-looking screenshots.

You can now automatically create a 3-frame layout in Browser-based Help for better integration in your own website. This can be done with just a couple of clicks – all you need to do is select the 3-frame layout mode in Project Properties and enter the name of the HTML file from your website that you want to load into the top frame. If you want you can also edit and generate the file for loading into the top frame directly in the Project Properties dialog.

The layout modes are selected in the new Layout section in the Browser-based Help section of Project Properties. The choice between a dynamic or a static TOC is now also made there and no longer in the Navigation section.

For details see the new chapters for Browser-based Help in Configuring Your Output and the documentation of the new Layout section in Project Properties.

In Browser-based Help you can now change the way that the TOC behaves when the user clicks on it:

Single-click navigation:

Expand and collapse chapters with a single click instead of a double click.

Auto-expand TOC:

Automatically expand the entire TOC or only top-level chapters when the user first accesses the help.

Auto-collapse TOC:

Automatically collapse all chapters except the chapter the user is currently view.

For details see the Browser-based Help sections in Configuring Your Output and Project Properties

You can now embed external files in the PDF files that you generate with Help & Manual. This makes it possible to distribute EXE, DOC, PDF, JPG and many other file types in a single PDF file.

The option is activated with a new option in the PDF project properties. It allows you to automatically embed all files with specific extensions that are referenced with file links in your project.

For details see Embedding files in PDFs in the PDF and Printed Manuals chapter.

By popular demand a new syntax highlighter has been added for C# code. You can now automatically format your C# code examples in Help & Manual with a couple of clicks.

See Formatting Program Source Code for details on using syntax highlighting.

Two new variables are now available for use in your templates in Browser-based Help. These variables are primarily designed to optimize your output for search engines.

<%TOPIC_TITLE_PATH%>

This works like the breadcrumbs variable but generates plain text instead of a link list and also includes the title of the current topic. You can use it in the <title> tag of your topic pages templates in Browser-based Help to improve search engine performance.

<%TOPIC_HEADER_TEXT%>

This returns the topic header as plain text and can be used for the description meta tag in your topic pages templates. It is useful if the text in your header is longer than the caption in the TOC and you want to make the header version available to search engines.

For details see HTML template variables in the Reference section.

CID font mode is now supported for more efficient embedding of Unicode fonts in PDF files. This option can make PDFs written in Asian languages using Unicode fonts significantly smaller. It should generally be turned off for languages that do not use Unicode fonts.

CID font mode should also produce better results for Asian languages when non-Asian fonts are used. For example, in the past Japanese text formatted with Arial sometimes did not convert to PDF properly, and this should now work correctly..

For details see CID Font Mode for Unicode fonts in the PDF and Printed Manuals chapter.

An INI file for SDL Trados is now included that makes editing and translating the XML output generated by Help & Manual much easier. The file automatically configures Trados to edit the Help & Manual XML schema properly.

You can find the file in the file in the \Templates\xml folder in the Help & Manual program directory. It is called

HelpAndManual for SDL Trados.ini.

When importing HTML Help .CHM files Help & Manual now correctly imports the undocumented "MS-HKWD" and "MS-HAID" meta tags and converts them to K-keywords and A-keywords, respectively.

These work as follows (in the source code of the CHM you are importing):