Support for external plugins
Help+Manual 8 has a new interface for external plugins that will allow a wide range of external HTML-based enhancements in the future, including things like translation tools and grammar checkers. The initial release comes with the first two plugins that add very powerful features to the program:
How to use the translation plugin |
PDF Peer Review Plugin |
DeepL machine translation plugin
DeepL is by far the best machine translation system that is generally available today. Compared to all other previous systems, it actually produces results that are usable with only a small amount of human editing. You just select the text you want to translate in your topic and click on Translate in the plugin pane to translate it to the target language, keeping all the original formatting intact.
Important: DeepL now has a free API key with which you can translate up to 500,000 characters per month free of charge.
Currently 24 supported languages: Bulgarian, British English, American English, Chinese (simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.
To use DeepL in Help+Manual you need a free or paid API key subscription from DeepL. Even the free subscription allows you to translate up to 500,000 characters per month, and the paid subscription has very reasonable rates. Either way, the costs are radically lower than getting translation done in the past.
See Machine Translation with DeepL for instructions, including on how to get and configure your free or paid API key.
PDF review plugin
Annotated/commented PDFs are the best way to distribute drafts to your colleagues for review.
Help+Manual could already export your project to PDF with comments for review. Now the PDF review plugin synchronizes those comments and the additional comments you receive back from your colleagues with your Help+Manual project.
See Peer Review with Annotated PDFs for detailed instructions.
You create the PDF with Help+Manual, including your own comments, and distribute it to your colleagues for additional comments, which they add with their own PDF commenting tool.
When they return the commented PDF to you, you open it with the plugin in Help+Manual and it shows you all the comments side by side with the topic selected in Help+Manual, along with a miniature preview of the PDF page.
