The ePub eBook output has been completely overhauled and now directly supports the Apple iPad and iPhone iBooks® format, as well as all other standard eBook readers that can handle ePub. This means you can publish and/or sell your documentation directly through the Apple iTunes store as eBooks.

See Apple iBooks® - ePub.

You can now use both JavaScript popups and plain text popups in a single CHM file. If you activate JavaScript popups all the popup links in your topic files will be displayed as JavaScript popups. However, the plain text popups file is also included in the CHM, so that you can also create field-level popups that display directly in your application.

Text wrapping around images set with the Alignment: attribute in the Insert Image dialog now displays in the Help & Manual editor. It now works in all output formats, including print-style formats like PDF.

You can now generate and insert QR codes in your text with the new QR Code tool. QR codes are graphical codes that can be scanned by smartphone cameras. If the code contains a web link or email link the smartphone's web browser or email program opens automatically when the code is scanned. QR codes can also contain all sorts of other information.

See Inserting QR codes.

For each style you can now define the "next" style to be displayed when you press enter at the end of a paragraph. This is especially useful for heading styles, where you can assign a body text style to be activated automatically when you press ENTER.

You can now edit text-based files in the Baggage Files section of your projects directly. The editor includes source code highlighting for most standard source code types.

Publishing Tasks make it easy to publish multiple verisions of a single project to multiple formats with different settings in a single operation. Once you have defined a task you can save it and reuse it with a couple of clicks. In earlier versions this was only possible with manually-programmed batch files, which many users found daunting.

See Publishing Tasks.

You can now edit multiple topics simultaneously by opening them in multiple tabs in the Help & Manual editor – for example to "park" topics that you are working on at the same time. Just right-click on a topic in the TOC and select Open topic in a new tab.

You can open multiple projects at the same time. Just select more than one project in the Open dialog and they will all open at the same time.

You can open a project in a new copy of Help & Manual from the Recent Projects list. Right-click on an entry in the Recent Projects list in the File menu and select Open in new instance.

If you activate the option to reopen the projects you were editing the last time you closed the program, Help & Manual will now automatically return to the last topic you were editing and re-open all the topics you had open in tabs.

See Program Options - General

A repository is a special project that contains topics and styles but no table of contents. You can use them to share styles and and reusable topics with multiple projects. You use the topics in a repository as snippets, and since the styles are also imported from the repository the snippets can be "pre-styled".

See Working with Repositories.

The spell checker has been completely overhauled and now supports Open Office spell checking and hyphenation dictionaries. You won't see much change in English because the English dictionaries were already pretty good, but you will see massive improvements for other languages. The actual interface of the spell checker remains the same.

If you're a Visual Studio .NET programmer you'll be glad to hear that Help & Manual 6 adds output support for the Visual Studio 2010 MSHC (Microsoft Help Viewer 1.0) format. You can still produce HSX output for earlier versions of Visual Studio as well, of course...

See Visual Studio Help.

Snippets (reusable formatted text blocks) can now be inserted in inline mode as well as block mode. This means you can insert a snippet inside a paragraph. You are no longer forced to have a paragraph break before and after the snippet.

See Re-using content with snippets.

You can now display expanding image toggles and embedded videos in "light box" mode instead of expanding and activating them as part of the page. When this option is activated the page darkens when the user clicks and the expanding image or video is displayed overlaid on the page in a "light box". The old mode is also still supported as well, of course.

See Inserting videos and HTML Export Options.

Expanding text is normally displayed expanded in print-style output (PDF, RTF, eBooks and printed manuals) and the icons used in WebHelp and CHM are often a distraction there. You can now suppress toggle icons in print-style output or replace them with a more appropriate icon.

See Insert Toggle.

•Split tables. Makes handling large tables much easier.

•Set border properties for individual cells. Makes it much easier to format complex tables without using nested tables.

WebHelp output has now been completely overhauled and is based on HTML 5 and modern iFrames instead of the old deprecated framesets. The TOC uses simple HTML lists instead of tables. Animations can be activated for TOC expand/collapse, toggles and other functions. A lot of new features have been added to allow easier customization for advanced users. The standard jQuery JavaScript framework is included in the export by default.

See Script and CSS components for experts.

A mini server is activated automatically for testing when you generate WebHelp output. This makes it possible to perform local testing easily with "problem" browsers like Internet Explorer (displays annoying warnings when opening WebHelp without a server) and Google Chrome (cannot handle iFrames or frames without a server).

See HM2Go - your own mini server.

•You can now set a gutter between columns when defining multi-column PDF output.

•You can use variables in all PDF bookmarks in your PDF templates (PDF bookmark text field in the page options of each section).

Previously, selecting the "Selected Topics" option in the Include Options when publishing would switch all the other include options to "true". You can now use this option in combination with other include options to produce more accurate quick test builds.

You can now use the new <%TARGETTITLE%> variable in the captions of your topic hyperlinks. When you use this variable instead of the title it automatically inserts the name of the target topic as the hyperlink text. See Inserting topic links.