We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 8.3. If you are using version 8 already, this update is included in your maintenance plan. Just download the setup and run it to update your current installation.
Changes and Additions in v8.3
Asian Font Names
This update significantly improves handling of Asian fonts. If you do not translate your documentation into Asian languages, you might never notice. Asian fonts have dual font names in Windows: their native name and an English equivalent. For instance, your Windows may support the font Microsoft YaHei, which is known to be a Chinese font. On a Chinese Windows, however, there is no Microsoft YaHei anywhere, you have 微软雅黑 instead, which means the same, just in Chinese. As long as the project stays on an English computer (or Chinese, for that matter), everything is fine. Problems may arise when the project is being edited on one PC and published on another, because despite it’s the very same font, the name strings don’t match.
Version 8.3 has a new global option to automatically translate Asian font names when a project or topic is loaded. In other words: no matter if the XML sources specify Microsoft YaHei or 微软雅黑, you will always see ‘Microsoft YaHei’, and vice versa on a Chinese system.
Auto-translation of Asian font names
Chinese characters in style names are now supported as well. Last, not least, design-time comments in Chinese were not exported properly to PDF, so the PDF peer-review did not work with Chinese comments.
ePUB and HelpXplain
The ePUB export got several changes for embedded Xplains. Before, Xplains were exported to ePUB as simple images, now they adhere to the export settings (as defined per Xplain) for DOCX/PDF/Print.
What’s more, the ePUB configuration page has a new setting to export Xplains natively, that is embedded, scripted. We do not recommend to use this, because most ePUB readers won’t be able to display interactive Xplains in an eBook. However, some browsers do and here you go. The ePUB manifest has been updated to integrate those scripted pages properly and mark them as ‘scripted’.
Miscellaneous Changes and Bug Fixes
- eWriter eBooks: updated viewer application, now supports <track> tags for video subtitles.
- Screen Capture: error fixed when the hotkey stop screen capture was already globally reserved by another program.
- DeepL Translation Plugin: the Translate and Apply button now have optional keyboard shortcuts. The internal XML code sent to DeepL has been updated to improve spacing issues in the DeepL translation process.
- Inline Text Toggles support optional icons.
- Synchronize Tool: the topic status in the target topic was applied with a lowercase “needs review” instead of a camel-case “Needs Review”. This might have triggered unintended updates of version control systems.
- DeepL Translation Plugin: the translation glossary is now applied to plain text as well (topic captions and keywords). Bugfix: when a partial table was selected, the translation was not applied.
- Spell Check: the suggestions list of the spelling checker did use MS Sans Serif as its default font, which is not fully capable of Unicode. As a result, some special characters may not have been displayed correctly.
- Image Shortcuts Gallery: the load method of the drop-down image gallery has been modified to better distribute the load time when accessing remote drives.
- Equations in HTML: equations are exported to HTML as transparent PNG images at twice their display size, to improve the appearance on high-resolution displays.
- Symbol Fonts in HTML: Help+Manual can export certain user-defined fonts as inline SVG. The fill-rule for those inline SVG has been changed to “nonzero” to improve the appearance of overlapping characters such as script fonts.
- Email links in Webhelp: all email links (mailto://) now have an explicit target attribute. While this attribute is usually ignored by the web browser, it might apply if the default email app is GMail or a similar web service. The target attribute ensures that the email app opens in a new tab or window.
- Table Text Rotation: error fix when applying table text rotation to an entire table.
Download
Help+Manual 8.3 is available from our download page: