More Advanced Procedures > Command Line Options > Publishing from your application

If you follow the rules and syntax of the Help & Manual XML Language you can generate Help & Manual projects directly from your application and publish them to any supported output format without ever opening Help & Manual.

This can be useful for producing things like automated program code documentation for which you do not need to edit the project in Help & Manual. Of course, you can also edit the projects you generate from your application manually with Help & Manual later if you want.

Note that Help & Manual Professional is required for this because the Basic version create uncompressed XML project files and its publishing capabilities for some of the features supported are also limited.

To write topics and projects directly, either from your application or manually, you need to follow the rules and syntax of the Help & Manual XML Language, which are documented in detail in the file Helpman_XML_ref.chm. This file can be found in the Help & Manual program directory.

The best way to get started is to work through this tutorial on the Help & Manual User forum:

Creating Content from Scratch with XML

You need to be a forum member to access this section. Registration is free and without any obligations, just click on Register in the forum header and follow the instructions displayed.

After generating your project from your application you can then publish it automatically with batch commands, following the instructions in the other topics in this chapter. You don't need to open Help & Manual to do this – provided you don't want to edit the content before publishing the entire process can be fully automated.

Note that this is only possible if you create an entire XML project, including a full, valid .hmxp project file. You cannot publish individual XML topic files programmatically with this method.