Productivity Tip

You can access the Editor settings quickly by right-clicking in the ruler above the editor window. This also provides quick access to the paragraph settings dialog.

Ruler units:

You can select pixels, inches, centimeters or points. Pixels are recommended for maximum accuracy – Help+Manual handles all sizes internally in pixels and all other units must be converted.

Display a vertical ruler:

Display a vertical ruler to the left of the editor as well as a horizontal ruler.

Show paragraph and text marks in editor:

Show spaces:

Makes tabs, paragraph end marks and spaces visible in the editor. This can be useful for identifying formatting problems. Can also be switched on and off with in Write > Paragraph .

Disable zoom and scale text only:

Turns off the global zoom feature in the Help+Manual editor so that only text is scaled. All other elements (graphics, tables etc) are then no longer scaled.

Font settings for XML and HTML editors:

Allows you to select a different font for the XML source code editor and the HTML code editors used for HTML templates, HTML code objects etc.

Only fixed-space console fonts like Courier New or Lucida Console will look good in these editors.

Smart selection:

When you select text Help+Manual tries to automatically select at whole word boundaries to make selectin easier and more accurate. In some languages like Japanese this can cause problems, because they do not have the same kind of white space word boundaries as Western European languages.

This option lets you turn this off when working in languages like this.

Live preview for styles:

When this is activated you will get a live preview of what the currently selected text will look like when formatted with styles when you scroll through styles in the style selector tool in the ribbon toolbar. You can turn this feature off if you find that it makes style selection slower.

Show strong table grid lines in edit mode:

Uses darker and slightly thicker grid lines to show the borders of tables. Can be useful to make tables more visible on some monitors.

Automatically detect URLs while typing text:

When this setting is active Internet URLs and email addresses will automatically be turned into Internet links as you type.

Auto-replace blanks in topic IDs with character:

Topic IDs containing blanks and some special characters would be invalid. By default, Help+Manual replaces the blanks and other illegal characters with hyphens. You can use this setting to change the character used.

We recommend using either hyphens (-) or underscores (_). You can use other characters, but if you select an illegal character it won't be used. Instead, the blank or illegal character in the ID will simply be deleted and not replaced.

Automatically manage topic bookmarks for every comment:

When this is selected creating a new comment automatically also creates a new bookmark for the current topic, using the beginning of the comment text as the bookmark label.

All the bookmarks will be listed in the Bookmarks tool but they will all link to the top of the topic. Deleting comments will also delete the linked bookmarks.

Apply status to new topics:

Choose a status (highlight color and name) to be applied to new topics automatically. Note that only the standard status settings (Needs Review, Out of Date, Under Construction) can be used for this. User-defined status settings are stored with your project, not with your program settings, and are thus not available here.

After changes set status to:

Automatically change the topic status to the value you specify after editing changes have been made.

Display color for read-only TOC items:

Sets a custom color for highlighting read-only topics and other items in the TOC. This is mainly relevant for multi-user editing and can make locked topics easier to identify in the TOC.

Use old (wrong) table style assignment

Version 8 fixes a table style problem that can break existing tables.

In version 7, a table displayed at least 1 colored heading row if (a) the table defined a dedicated heading row color or (b) the table style defined a dedicated heading row color. Even then, when a particular table defined its number of heading rows as zero (this is a table-specific property, not a style property).

In other words, setting a table style with a heading row color automatically made tables without heading rows display at least one colored heading row. This was in fact wrong and has been corrected in version 8.

However, this change may break existing tables which previously displayed a colored heading row, despite their heading row count was zero. You need to modify those tables and assign a dedicated heading row count > 0.

To restore the previous behavior of table styles, enable this option.

Translate Asian Font Names

This option is important when editing Asian help projects on a non-Asian Windows version.

Most Asian fonts have two names, their original name and an English name. For example, the font "微软雅黑" is a Chinese font, which will show as "微软雅黑" on a Chinese Windows, but as "Microsoft YaHei" on a non-Chinese Windows. Both names, the original name and the English name, can be used to assign this font to a text, but only one variant is selectable in the font dialog box. On an English Windows, you will always see "Microsoft YaHei" in the font dialog box, on a Chinese Window there's instead a font named "微软雅黑".

In order to be able to edit (and not just export) Asian projects on a non-Asian Windows, Help+Manual can translate Asian font names when the project is loaded. On an English Windows, all occurrences of native font names will be translated their English equivalent and vice versa.

Treat Impict images (*.ipp) as transparent

When this is set the background color of Impict IPP images (i.e. the color of the canvas) will be treated as transparent. The IPP images will then be exported as a PNG with a transparent background.

Auto-adjust legacy WMF images

The old Windows WMF vector format was created long before modern, high-resolution monitors and laptop screens existed. It prevents your old WMF images from being scaled incorrectly by Windows and displayed too large on high-resolution screens. It should also be on if you are working in a team with some users on traditional monitors and others on high-resolution monitors.

See Supported graphics formats for more details on this setting and when you might want to turn it off.

We strongly recommend that the old WMF and EMF vector formats should no longer be used. Use modern SVG vector graphics instead.