Help+Manual News

Premium Pack 3.40 — SVG Icons Edition


This update to the Help+Manual Premium Pack add-on adds replaceable SVG sprite icons to the user interface. It also adds a few refinements to the V3 skins and the Toolbox utility, tidies up some of the CSS and squashes a couple of small bugs (crunch crunch crunch). It is a recommended update for all Premium Pack users.

How to Get the Premium Pack Update:

[showhide type=”howtoget” more_text=”Click for instructions” less_text=”Click to hide”]You can download and install the updated version with the credentials you received when you purchased. If you no longer have this please contact support@ec-software.com and we will help you out. See the Premium Pack product page for more details on Premium Pack 3 and visit our online store to purchase.[/showhide]

SVG Sprite Icons

[showhide type=”svgsprites” more_text=”Click for details” less_text=”Click to hide”]We have replaced the font icons in the V3 skins (WebHelp and EWriter) with SVG sprites. This eliminates problems some people had when working on systems configured to block font downloads.

Windows is a little retarded in this respect, it even regards local font files as font downloads. This significantly reduces the overheads for the icons, reducing the number of files that need to be loaded for the icons on page load to zero.

We have also replaced the PNG icons in the TOC with SVG icons, which are a lot sharper and more flexible. See Using Your Own Icons for details.

Simple SVG icons can consist of just a few bytes instead of tens of kilobytes or more. In addition to this you can pack a whole set of SVG icons into a single file called an SVG sprite that can then be integrated directly in the web page. This makes them much more efficient, since no external files need to be loaded. Furthermore, unlike normal graphics files or even discrete SVG files, SVG sprites can be styled with normal CSS, just like HTML text.

Making this switch was a major project. Although everything looks pretty much the same after this change performance is improved, icons are generally sharper and the number of http requests that need to be made on each page load has been significantly reduced. It also eliminates an annoying problem, so that it is no longer possible for font download blocking to stop correct icon display.[/showhide]

V3 Skins Maintenance Update

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  • Featured image improvements
    You can now choose whether the description for the featured image is displayed at the top or bottom of the image. Bottom is now the default. You can also set the font and font size for the description, and clicking on the image in the browser hides or shows the description. See Help+Manual Featured Images for instructions and Featured Images in the variables reference for a list of the configuration variables.
  • JavaScript deactivation warning
    If a user attempts to access V3 WebHelp or EWriter with JavaScript disabled a plain warning screen is now displayed instead of a broken web page.
  • Current topic or project option for browser title bar
    You can now configure whether the current topic, the project name or both are shown in the browser title bar and Windows taskbar in the WebHelp skins (not applicable for EWriter). This is configured with the new TITLEBAR_CONTENT variable in the General Settings variables group.
  • Errors in updating of breadcrumb navigation links
    In some cases since version 3.35 the links in the breadcrumb navigation were not updated correctly. This was a side-effect of the new “No TOC entry for this topic” message displayed for topics not in the TOC.
  • Project reference in mail feedback form in EWriter:
    The EWriter skins incorrectly included a localhost URL to the project inside the EWriter viewer in the mail generated by the mail feedback option.
  • CSS fine tuning
    While switching to the SVG icons we took the opportunity to fine-tune a lot of the CSS in desktop, tablet and phone modes. The changes are subtle but the general appearance is now better.

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Toolbox utility maintenance update

[showhide type=”tbmaintenance” more_text=”Click for details” less_text=”Click to hide”]

  • // instead of http:// or https:// permitted in URL variables
    All URL variables now allow you to enter just // instead of http:// or https:// as the prefix for the URL. Using // works correctly automatically in both https:// and http:// pages, so that you don’t need to check.
  • Refresh after deleting baggage files
    The baggage files list table was not refreshed correctly after deleting baggage files in Toolbox (the deleted file was still shown in the list).
  • Export baggage files
    The Baggage Files section now has a function that allows you to export a selected baggage file, enabling you to save a copy of it somewhere else.
  • Normalize styles: protect imported styles
    The Normalize Project Styles function for the entire project has a new option that allows you to protect imported styles that have not yet been added to the project stylesheet. This makes it possible to normalize the entire project without having to process the imported styles first.
  • Graphics editors with .EXE instead of .exe extension
    If you selected a graphics editor with an upper case .EXE extension in the preferences, Toolbox failed to open it, claiming that it was not a valid executable file.

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More information

See the Premium Pack information page for general details and purchase information and the Premium Pack web-based documentation for full instructions.

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