We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 8.1. If you are using version 8 already, this is update is included in your maintenance plan. Just download the setup and run it to update your current installation.

The focus for this update was on speed issues and on floating licenses.

1. Saving Screenshots Took to Long

Did you ever experience a delay when taking a screenshot with Help+Manual? The delay occurred after the screenshot had been taken and before the save dialog appeared. If yes, this is an important update for you!

When taking a screenshot, Help+Manual prompts you to save the screenshot as picture file and suggests a file name, something like clip0019.png. To make sure this suggested file name is unique and not already used by another image, Help+Manual has to test whether such a file exists anywhere in the project search path. This function was not fast enough and that became even more obvious during the covid19 pandemic, where many users were working from home offices, connected via VPN. The connection lag multiplied those delays.

What’s new is, that the save dialog for screenshots should come up 10 to 50 times faster than before – depending on the folder structure of your help project.

2. Optional Password for Floating Licenses

This is important news for admins: the Floating License Manager has been updated with a password/PIN code function. This is an additional security layer, which can be applied to a pool of floating licenses by the administrator. When a password/PIN code is set in place, Help+Manual will prompt the user to enter the password/PIN code. This code is stored locally, so that the end user is not required to enter it every time.

Admins can set or change the password/PIN code to effectively exclude users who are no longer authorized to use a license from the floating license pool.

3. Miscellaneous Changes and Bug Fixes

• Faster loading and memory optimized printing for large JPEG images: if a single topic contained several very large JPEG images, the time to load this topic – and decode the JPEG images – has been improved. This also affects printing of such a topic.
• Print Topic: the function to print a single topic has been improved and fixes an optical glitch during printing.
• Project Full Report: the list of unused images also reported files without an extension
• Drag & drop of TOC items: when a TOC item was dragged to another node, the arrow buttons to shift TOC items up/down and left/right where not initialized correctly.
• Table Insert Row: inserting a table row with keyboard commands only (SHIFT+F10 > Table > Rows > Insert) has triggered an error.
• Improved dialog to pin a floating license for offline use: Help+Manual allows you to check out (pin) a floating license for offline use. A pinned floating license is exclusively assigned to that computer and blocked for everybody else. Though this function is not required to normally use a floating license, some users always activated it. A new “pin” dialog explains this function better.

Download

Help+Manual 8.1.0 is available from our download page:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html

As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, we’ve released a maintenance update for Help+Manual 8. If you are using version 8 already, this is update is included in your maintenance plan. Just download the setup and run it to update your current installation.

1. Link lists with Inline Option

The new link lists in version 8 are a highly appreciated feature by most users and we quickly received suggestions how to improve them further. While we are still collection user suggestions for this new object, one of these has been implemented with the 8.0.3 update: an inline option to publish a list of links as comma-separated text, instead of a classic list.

2. Admin Tool: Change File Associations

The View tab has a button to start a new tool, that sets, changes or removes file associations in Windows. A file association tells Windows which program to start when you double click, for instance, a file with the extension .HMXZ. These file associations are automatically set by the installer. For admins who administer floating licenses, however, this can be a big help.

3. PDF Layout Configuration

If you create PDF manuals with numbered outlines (outlines are the interactive TOC in a PDF file), the outline numbering was not reflected by the links that point to those topics. The PDF Layout configuration setting now features a configuration option whether to apply numberings to links as well or not:

4. Miscellaneous New Features and Bug Fixes

• eWriter eBooks: the eBook viewer has been updated to v2.3.5 and now supports external file links to other ebook files, with deep linking. This means you can open another eWriter ebook and jump a specific topic.
• Equations (math objects) were not exported to DOCX
• Insert Table dialog: when changing the table style, the number of heading rows is automatically changed as well.
• XML read bug: if a <snippet> tag is placed on a separate line in the XML source code, an extra blank line was inserted before the snippet in Help+Manual.
• Copy & paste of topics in TOC: topic title does no longer get an enumeration extension like “_2”
• List update bug: #150 and #151 in non-symbol fonts (dash and long dash) were sometimes displayed with a symbol charset
• Updated SubVersion comparison dialog / conflict editing dialog
• Three new HTML variables have been introduced – these variables can be used in the topic HTML template (more on this in a separate blog post later):
  • <%HM_LINKLIST_SIBLINGS%> Generates an <ul> list of all topics that are on the same level as the current topic, excluding the current topic.
  • <%HM_LINKLIST_CHILDREN%> Generates an <ul> list of child topics of the current topic.
  • <%HM_LINKLIST_ANCHORS%> Generates an <ul> list of all anchors in the current topic.

Download

Help+Manual 8.0.3 is available from our download page:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html