This special task at the top of the list is generated automatically. It stores the publish operations performed manually in the regular Publish screen so that you can repeat them at any time.

Recent Publishes is read-only

This task is read-only because it is generated and updated automatically. All the actions in it are updated whenever a publish operation is performed manually in the regular Publish screen. Its purpose is to make it easy to repeat the most recent publish operation for a specific output format.

1.Double-click on each action in the task and check at least the output file name and path. If you want, you can also set include options and redefine some variables in your project as well.

2.Close the action editing dialog and click on Publish Task to finish. Help+Manual will then perform all the publishing task actions one after another.

3.There is no step 3, you're finished!

If you want, you can also publish just individual actions in a task instead of all of them.

1.Select the actions you want to publish in the task. If you want to select more than one action use Ctrl+Click and Shift+Click.

2.Right click on the selected items or click on More... to display the context menu:

3.Select Publish Selected Item(s) to publish.

If you are in a hurry you can repeat recent manual publish operations with the "Recent Publishes" task, which is generated automatically by Help+Manual. You will only see this task if you have published the current project manually at least once.

You can repeat all the publish operations stored in Recent Publishes unchanged, publish individual actions (see above) or edit the actions to change them before publishing.

Recent Publishes is read-only, but you can clone it as a basis for a new task. See below.

The Recent Publishes task is auto-generated and read-only. However, you can clone it with the Duplicate Entire Task tool to use it as a starting-point for a new editable task with a set of actions.

If you want to create a variants of one or more actions in a task you can clone them for a faster result. Use SHIFT + Click and CTRL + Click to select multiple actions.

Once a task has been defined in a project you can also call it from the command line if you want to make it part of your build process. For full details on the command line build interface see Command Line Publishing.

Generate a batch file from the Task Manager

You can generate the commands listed below in a batch file automatically. Note that this does not create a fully-itemized batch file using the command line publishing API. It simply creates a command line to call the publishing task and actions, using the syntax listed below, and saves it in a .cmd file.

For all actions:
Make sure that no actions are selected. Select More > Generate Publish Batch File (not the right-click menu) and then store the .cmd file with the dialog displayed.

For one or more actions:
Select the actions, then right-click and select Generate Publish Batch File and save the file.

Execute the entire task

To execute the entire task you use the switch /tsk= with the name of the task, enclosed in quotes if the name includes a space.

<path>\HELPMAN.EXE <path>\myproject.hmxp /tsk="Daily Export"

Execute a single action

To execute just a single action from the task you add the name of the action after a colon (:) character

<path>\HELPMAN.EXE <path>\myproject.hmxp /tsk="Daily Export:ClientA_PDF"

IMPORTANT: No other command line parameters are supported

When you call a task from the command line only the operations and settings used in the task are used. All other parameters are ignored. If you need the more granular control provided by the command line build interface you need to use only the command line interface.