There are basically two ways to edit the Help+Manual's XML source code: In the source code editor for topics, which you can find in the XML tab on the left the main editor window, and by editing the actual source of your project files directly with an external XML editor.
To access the XML source files you need to save in the uncompressed .hmxp format. You can then edit all the source files with any normal text editor or a dedicated XML editor.
If you want to make any changes to the code you must observe the rules and syntax of the Help+Manual XML Language, which is open and fully documented in the Help+Manual XML Language Reference help file you can find in the Help+Manual program directory.
The helpproject.xsd XML schema file is automatically saved with every Help+Manual project, in the project folder. It is used to check the well-formedness and syntax of all the XML in the project files. Do not make any changes to this schema. Help+Manual depends on it being the way it is, and any changes must be supported and integrated in the program itself.
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You can edit the source code of the current topic directly in the XML Source tab behind the main editor window. This tab contains a simple code editor with syntax highlighting, word wrap and search and replace features. The code you enter is automatically parsed and checked for syntax and well-formedness. It will only be accepted if it does not contain any errors.
Note that you can only edit one topic at a time in the XML Source tab. If you want to edit multiple topics you must use an external editor with multi-topic capabilities and edit the source files directly.
Search and spell checking are both available in the XML editor – just right-click in the editor to access these features.
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Once you have gained an understanding of the basic principles of the XML syntax you can perform complex search and replace operations on the XML source code that would not be possible in the Help+Manual editor.
To do this you will need an editor that can perform search and replace operations on multiple files in multiple folders. If you are not using a dedicated XML editor a very good and inexpensive tool for this is  FAR HTML from Helpware, which also has an excellent complex search and replace tool that is easier to use than regular expressions.
Alternatively, if you feel comfortable with regular expressions for complex text processing you can use "grep" utilities like PowerGREP from JG Software, which is one of the best tools available for this. JG also has a great tool for generating and testing regular expressions called RegEx Buddy. PowerGREP can also work on compressed .hmxz projects, because you can set it up to read and edit the contents of zip archives. You just need to tell it that files with the .hmxz extension are zip archives.
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Help+Manual projects are saved with an XSL stylesheet for WYSIWYG previews in web browsers and XML editors. Because of the way XML works this doesn't provide WYSIWYG editing in XML editors, but it does give you an idea of how the page will eventually look.
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