As a normal documentation author you do not need to know anything about Help+Manual's XML source code to get all the benefits from using Help+Manual. Familiarity with XML is really only needed for users who want to generate their topic files from their own applications automatically in XML format and for performing complex search and replace operations directly on your project files with an external editor.
If you are used to editing HTML pages you might feel tempted to try to edit the XML code in the XML Source tab to tweak your topic formatting. Because of the absolute strictness of XML, doing this will be more trouble than it is worth in most cases. It is best to use this tab just as a reference when you need to know how your topic formatting is defined in the XML source.
 Key Information
XML editing is for experts only. Although XML looks a little like HTML it is actually very different and does not tolerate even the smallest syntax error.
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The XML Source tab is a text editor with syntax highlighting. You can copy, cut and paste and both search and spell-checking are supported (right-click in the XML editor window for options).
If you want you can also copy the entire contents of the XML Source to a separate file – this is effectively the same as exporting the topic to an external XML file with Topics > Save Topic to File.
You can only edit individual topics in the XML Source tab. To perform global search and replace operations you must edit the source files of your project directly with an external editor capable of performing search and replace operations on multiple files. If you select another topic directly while the XML Source tab is active you will be returned to the Page Editor tab automatically.
Help+Manual's XML format is open and fully documented. Full documentation is available in the file Helpman_XML_ref.chm which you can find in the Help+Manual program directory.
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If you use Help+Manual Professional you can save your projects in as uncompressed XML files with an .hmxp file as the main project file (this file is also an XML file).
If you observe the syntax rules of the Help+Manual XML Language you can edit these files directly, either with a normal text editor or with a specialized XML editor. If you have an editor that supports multiple-file search and replace you can also perform search and replace operations on your entire project that are not possible directly in Help+Manual itself. For example, you can use an editor that supports regular expressions to perform very complex manipulations on the text and the source code.
WARNING: Don't try to edit XML files in word processors like MS Word!
When you save XML files with a word processor they may change the source code and make it unusable in Help+Manual. Some versions of Word will actually change the source code Microsoft's own version of XML. You should always use either a normal text editor or a source code or dedicated XML editor.
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Help+Manual can only process XML files conforming to the Help+Manual XML Language. These can be produced by Help+Manual itself or generated by other programs that conform to the language schema specifications. Documentation of the Help+Manual XML Language can be found in the Help+Manual program directory (Helpman_XML_ref.chm). Currently you cannot export or import any other XML formats.
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See also:
XML and XML editing
