XML support in Help & Manual

Help & Manual 4 Professional exports and imports help projects in XML format.

The Help & Manual XML schema describes the entire structure of a help project in XML and enables a complete round-trip: export > translate > recompile

XML Workflow

External translation (XML export and re-import)

XML export is included as one of the standard output formats. It creates an XML file that not only contains the content, but also the text format and the necessary meta information. XML export is mainly designed for external translation with standard localization tools (e.g. Trados and other tools with support for translation memories).

Help & Manual's XML Schema is very close to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) XML standard for technical documentation. All necessary files (Schema, XSLT stylesheet, configuration files and XML topic files) are automatically generated during the export. Help & Manual can optionally create a complete localization kit in form of a ZIP archive.

XML Source Code Editor

XML source editor

The topic editor in Help & Manual 4.1 Professional features a new editing option: XML Source.This allows you to switch from the WYSIWYG topic view to XML view and edit a help topic directly in XML format.

Project synchronization

Users who do translation internally or prefer to work in Help & Manual, should look at the Project Synchronization feature. This function takes a language pair (two Help & Manual projects) and updates one with the changes in the other. Help & Manual already all necessary tracking information and date/time stamps to keep track of changes.

XML import for migration

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While the XML export is mainly designed for translation, the XML import is very flexible.

Help & Manual includes schema files, XSLT templates and extensive documentation of the XML schema to enable transformation of 3rd-party XML data structures into the Help & Manual schema.