Help & Manual 4.31 released

Version 4.31 includes an updated version of the editor that makes it possible for pages to break inside table rows in PDF, RTF and printed manual output. This means that you no longer need to be careful not to create rows with too much content in projects you are going to output to PDF. Even very large cells will now break correctly.

PDF output font embedded was improved to better support embedded fonts across different platforms.

Four new configuration options have been added that allow you to control the appearance and behavior of the TOC in HTML Help. You can now switch on a mouseover effect (TOC entries are underlined when under the mouse pointer), turn on and off the +/- icons in the TOC, turn on and off dotted lines between items and automatically collapse all chapters except the chapter being viewed.

Importing and exporting HTML Help .CHM files has been significantly improved for Asian languages, Russian and some other languages. Even CHMs with variant encoding will now generally be imported correctly and problems some users have experienced with full-text search in CHMs in these languages have been corrected. (These problems were caused by the MS HTML Help viewer's inability to handle Unicode encoding correctly.)

For Delphi programmers version 4.31 includes new versions of the Delphi Wizards that are compatible with Delphi 2007 for Win32. The new wizards will be installed automatically if Delphi 2007 is detected on your system.

The project synchronization synchronizes topics and the table of contents of two help projects for translation. In modular help systems, this function reset child modules with different file names. The synchronization function has been changed in order to leave child modules intact, even if the file names differ.

The keyword index in Browser-based Help now also supports the use of special characters like German umlauts and Danish special characters as section headers with correct sorting. The Browser-based Help index now uses the same sorting and section break algorithm that was already implemented in PDF export.

The new <%TOPICID%> variable returns the plain topic ID as written in the Topic ID: field of Topic Options, without any filename  extension and without changing the ID text to lower case. This can be useful for meta tags in your HTML pages for search engines. See HTML template variables in the Reference section for details.

When you import variables from another .HMX project file you can now opt to merge the imported variables with your existing variable list, instead of overwriting the current list. (Project Properties > Common Properties > Text Variables > Copy Properties From...)

Windows Vista: Help & Manual is now "dpi-aware", which results in a sharper UI display when used on Vista with large system fonts and Vista font scaling on.

The Topics > Expand menu can expand a single chapter only, the XML editor in the topic pane has a right-click menu. The Redo function in the text editor was sometimes disabled when it should have been enabled. The inplace table editor now automatically adds a new table row when the tab key is pressed  in the last cell.

Toggles in print/PDF: screenshot toggles which used different images for expanded and collapsed view, printed with the collapsed image though.

XML export and import: small change to the XML schema to save background colors for paragraphs and text styles separately. During import, empty build tags (topics that don't have any build option selected) were initialized with "all" builds as the default.

Help 2.0 export: when compiled in batch mode, the created HxS file is no longer automatically registered.

Javascript popups with MSIE shadow and transition effects: those effects are now hard-coded into the popup style rather than applied at runtime to avoid Javascript problems with other browsers than Internet Explorer. The script was further changed to fix a position problem of formatted popups in MSIE 7.

End user license agreement (EULA) changed to handle concurrent user licenses and installation on multiple computers explicitly used by one person only.