1.Save your project, then select Publish in the Project tab:

2.Select the output format from the drop-down list at the top. This will display the options for that format.

•For details on the options see the reference to the Publish Help Project dialog.

3.Check the Output File: field. You can change the default output folder and the file name if you want. Help+Manual will remember this change next time you publish. However, if you are publishing to WebHelp we strongly recommend that you accept the "index.html" file name as that is the best choice for WebHelp in almost all cases.

4.Configure your output options, then click on Publish Now to publish. This can take a couple of minutes with very large projects.

A report on the publish process including any errors and a list of the files and/or folders you need to include when you distribute your help to your users is displayed in a window. This window contains controls with which you can search, copy, print or save the report to an external HTML file.

For test purposes you can publish only the topics that are currently selected in the Table of Contents pane (TOC). If exported topics contain links to topics not included in your output you may want to take steps to handle this. See Preventing dead links for instructions on how to deal with this.

1.Select the topics you want to publish in the TOC pane. You can use Ctrl+Click and Shift+Click to select multiple topics out of order and sequences of topics. Selecting chapters automatically selects all the chapters' sub-topics.

2.Select Publish in the File menu or the Project tab.

3.Click on the Table of Contents bar and select Publish selected TOC items only from the drop-down list:

4.Select your other publish options, then click on Publish Now to publish.

CHM and WebHelp output:

In the Microsoft HTML Help (CHM) and WebHelp (HTML) output formats  you can apply a completely different layout and appearance to your published output by choosing a "skin" file in the Publish dialog. Skins include everything from your project that defines the general appearance of your output: Your variable definitions, HTML templates, text and table styles and your Baggage Files.

Help+Manual comes with some sample skins in the \Skins folder in the Help+Manual program directory. If you have the Professional or Floating license version of the program you can also save your own projects as skins to apply their appearance to other projects without additional formatting.

See Transforming your output with skins for full details.

1.Select Publish in the File menu or the Project tab.

2.Then select the skin file you want to apply in the Select Skin section and click on Publish Now to publish.

See HTML Help and WebHelp for more details on preparing your project for these output formats.

PDF and DOCX output:

PDF and DOCX use templates to publish that define the page layout and other features of the output documents. These are called Word Templates and Print Manual Templates and can be selected directly in the Publish dialog. Here too, you can select from a selection of standard templates included with Help+Manual.

See Adobe PDF and printed manuals and MS Word DOCX for details on preparing your templates for these output formats.

Once you have tagged content in your project with include options you can then "filter" your published output when you publish. You do this by selecting or deselecting the checkboxes for the corresponding include options in the Publish settings when you publish. See Conditions and Customized Output for details.

Filtering with include options:

•In the Include Options: section at the bottom of the Publish screen, select the options matching the content you want to include in your output.

The topics and content tagged with matching include options in your project will be included ore excluded from your published output depending you your selections. The option for the current output format is activated automatically and should normally always be selected.

Including content tagged for other output formats

You can optionally select the include options for other output formats if you also want to include content that is actually tagged for those formats. For example, when you publish to CHM the CHM include option is selected by default. If you also want to include content that you have actually tagged to be included only in WebHelp you can do that by manually activating the WebHelp checkbox as well.

Filtering by "Complete" status:

This is only relevant if you have actually applied topic status to topics in the TOC. It allows you to exclude all topics that do not have the status "Complete" from your output, thus automatically excluding any topics that are unfinished or require review.

Select the option Topic Status: Complete Only below the Include Options box in the Publish dialog.

eWriter Help is a special case, because internally they are classed as both eBooks and WebHelp. Their content is exactly the same as WebHelp and supports nigh on all the formatting and scripting that WebHelp supports. However, they are – or can be – distributed in the same way as eBooks. Because of this, eWriter is the only output format that has two active include options for including and excluding content: both EBOOK (eBooks) and HTML (WebHelp).

If you look at the Include Options box in the Publish dialog when you publish to eWriter you will see that both the WebHelp and the eBook options are selected. This means that an eWriter Help file will normally include any content tagged for either WebHelp or eBooks.

Including content in eWriter Help only

If you want content to be include only in eWriter Help you need to nest two conditions around it, like this:

IF_HTML IF_EBOOK ... END END

Then it will only be included in eWriter Help and nowhere else.

Include options for topics and chapters

Topics and chapters will be included in eWriter Help if they are tagged with either WebHelp or eBook.

Normally, you cannot publish help projects written Asian languages on non-Asian versions of Windows because the necessary language settings don't match. However, if you just want to do a quick test publish and don't have a Windows version in the matching Asian language there is a configuration setting that will allow you to do this.

•Go to View > Program Options > Compilers and activate the option Tolerant handling of Asian languages.

Some features may not work correctly in the resulting help file in HTML Help if the languages of your Windows version and the help file don't match (Search, Keyword Index) but you will be able to complete the compilation and view the CHM file, which is sufficient for testing.

To produce a finished CHM for distribution you must publish it on a copy of Windows with a matching system locale.