Help+Manual News

We are glad to announce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 9.7 and an updated Translation Assistant. This is in fact quite a large update, although most of the changes remain mostly “invisible”.

The most important change concerns the DeepL translation plugin and the DeepL bulk translation function in the Translation Assistant. Both applications have switched to the latest version of the DeepL translation API.

Help+Manual 9.7 Changes

• DeepL: new API implemented.
• DeepL: new option included to change from “non-splitting-tags” to explicit “splitting-tags”.
• DeepL: the editor for API glossaries now shows line numbers. If there are any duplicates in the list, it jumps to the corresponding line number.
• DeepL: protected word lists and API glossaries are saved as UTF-8 text when exported within the dialog box.
• DeepL: translating single TOC entries included a line break in the translation, which created problems when building breadcrumb tags for the HTML output, because the line break was preserved in the breadcrumb tag.
• SnipSVG images: when using the native .SnipX format in Help+Manual, these images are translated into SVG images in the HTML output and are implemented with an <object> tag. Embedding SVGs with an  <object> tag is mandatory to for interactive SVG files. The converter has been updated to version 2.0 in order to support animated SVG files created by the (upcoming) SnipSVG 2.0.
• Equations: the entry box for the equation how has a vertical scrollbar for extra long equations. When inserting a new equation, the initial dummy text “a = x + y” is highlighted and the edit control is active, so the user can start typing right away.
• Equations: improved vertical placement in HTML, both when exported as inline SVG and PNG. The inline SVG has been upscaled to a multiplier of 8 instead of 4, resulting in smoother curves.
• Markdown Snippets and Load-topic-from-Markdown: Markdown headings are now auto-imported as anchors, the anchor ID is built according to the Microsoft standard for Github. (Markdown does not have anchors as we know them from HTML, but some Markdown interpreters consider headings as valid anchors, with an auto-converted ID.) With this change, it is now possible to deep-link into the content of Markdown snippets.
• Insert Anchor dialog: the dialog box is now sizeable.
• The WEBP library ECLibWebp.dll is loaded dynamically. This speeds up the start of H&M, because the DLL is loaded on demand only (when the first webp image needs to be decoded).
• eViewer 5.3 included.
• Project Report: includes help context numbers of master/child projects.
• HTML Export: videos – including web videos like youtube – always contained an outer div with the class name <div class=”video-lightbox” …>. Inline videos did not have a class name. Change: inline videos now have <div class=”video-inline” …> and both have an additional HTML class “flexwidthXXX”.
• HTML Export: if a Youtube video specified a poster image, but the image file was missing, this caused a silent error.
• HTML Export / ARIA: to improve accessibility, manually bold formatted text is exported with a <strong> tag (instead of <span>), manually italic formatted text is exported with an <em> tag instead of <span>. You will not see any differerence in the HTML output, but these tags are interpreted differently by screen readers.
• HTML Export (CHM only): for YouTube and Vimeo web videos, Help+Manual does not use lightboxes anymore, but redirects to an external browser window. This was already the case for Prezi presentations. All of them, YouTube, Vimeo and Prezi have given up support for Internet Explorer (the display engine in CHMs). To prevent inevitable Javascript errors with web videos, the CHM file opens a new window in the default web browser to run the video.
• PDF export: when exporting SVG images as PNG (because they include drawing commands, which cannot be translated to PDF), the SVG image is rendered larger than displayed to get a better PNG quality. This might increase the PDF size in some cases.
• PDF export: if the very last page (back cover) of a manual template contained a PDF snippet, the PDF export failed with an error.

Help+Manual Translation Assistant 9.7 Changes

• DeepL: new API implemented.
• DeepL: new option included to change from “non-splitting-tags” to explicit “splitting-tags”.
• DeepL: the editor for API glossaries now shows line numbers. If there are any duplicates in the list, it jumps to the corresponding line number.
• DeepL: protected word lists and API glossaries are saved as UTF-8 text when exported within the dialog box.
• Topic editor: improved mouse-hints for inline text toggles.
• Image hotspot editor: asks to save changes, if the dialog is canceled after changes have been made.

All updates are available from our download page.