Archive for category CHM HTML Help
Premium Pack 3.48 Maintenance Update
Posted by tim green in CHM HTML Help, Skins, Software Updates, Uncategorized on October 11, 2019
We have just released a very minor update of the Premium Pack with the following small improvements and fixes. You only need to update your skins if any of the following things are important to you.
How to Get the Premium Pack Update:
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 if you do not yet have it.
V3 Skins (WebHelp and eWriter versions)
- Tooltips in ATOC menu: The ATOC_TIP variable was not set to HTML and as a result the entity was displayed as code in the tooltips instead of as a space.
- Disabling the ATOC: The ATOC_SHOW variable for disabling the ATOC was not connected and had no effect. This was never noticed because the ATOC menu is automatically hidden if there are no corresponding links in the current topic.
- Top navigation button: In some configurations clicking or tapping on the Top topic navigation button would not jump to the correct higher-level topic.
CHM skins
- Topic header components: Improved scaling on modern. high-resolution monitors and Windows devices.
- Drop-down menu components: Improved scaling on modern. high-resolution monitors and Windows devices.
- Topic header title text color: New variable (HD_TEXTCOLOR in the Header Components group) setting the topic header title color in the skin. This eliminates the need to set the color correctly in the Help+Manual project.
Toolbox utility
- Close project warning: If you open a new project or skin while one is already open a warning is now only displayed if the current project contains unsaved edits. This makes switching to a new project or skin faster.
HelpXplain 1.1.0 and Help+Manual 7.5.3 Updates
Posted by Alexander Halser in CHM HTML Help, HelpXplain, Software Updates on September 7, 2019
We are glad to announce two updates for both, HelpXplain and Help+Manual. HelpXplain has full audio support and Help+Manual needs a few changes to support this, too.
HelpXplain 1.1.0
- HelpXplain 1.1.0 has full audio support! Audios in Xplains work in the regular HTML output, in Help+Manual’s Webhelp, eWriter eBooks and in HTML Help (.chm) files. All player skins include audio controls.Check out the “Fun with audios” demo here:
https://www.helpandmanual.com/help/gf_gettingstarted_audio.html
Other changes and bug fixes in version 1.1.0:
- Publish deletes all files in data folder.
- Original JPEG/PNG images were not exported as original but recreated, sometimes resulting in larger image files
- Several undo/redo bugs fixed
- Scrolling of slide list after slide deletion improved
- When pasting slides, the pasted slides are inserted at the current position in the slide list, not at the end
- File drag & drop on welcome page implemented
- PDF export did not support Unicode file names
Help+Manual 7.5.3
Changes in Help+Manual:
- Insert HelpXplain dialog: defaults for Xplains changed to lightbox mode (this is really important for Xplains with audio support)
- All CHM skins have been changed to elevate the internal rendering engine to Internet Explorer 11 instead of 10 (this is important for Xplains with audio support to make the audio work inside CHM files)
- Publishing tasks: include comments in PDF was not working
Download
Both are free updates if included in your maintenance plan! Please download the update(s) and install it over your existing version.
Help+Manual 7.5 Released!
Posted by Alexander Halser in CHM HTML Help, HelpXplain, PDF, Software Updates on April 23, 2019
We are glad to anncounce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 7.5.0. This update ships with several improvements including:
- Text-to-table function updated: several users asked to simplify the text-to-table function and to not apply explicit column widths. The function is now much more transparent and simply splits text by tab stops.
When using the right-click text-to-table function, the default table style class is applied automatically and the inserted table reflects the table style. - Clipboard paste from OneNote implemented
- Improved topic header synchronization: when duplicating a topic in the TOC with copy and paste, and subsequently changing the duplicated TOC heading, the automatic synchronization with the topic header did not work, because of the added “_2” text that marks the topic copy.
Bugfixes and minor changes
- Nested snippets from repositories did not work, PDF print styles were not applied to snippets.
- PDF/Print: If a dropdown toggle had a page break right before the toggle icon, and the icon was removed for print and the left margin of this paragraph was zero, the page break was removed and not re-applied.
- After saving a project, a topic reload sometimes occurred, causing the cursor to jump to the beginning of a topic and losing the current selection.
- Font preview in main window: in some rare situations, an access violation ocurred
- Windows EXE e-books: updated viewer application, the initial ClearCache command has been removed to avoid initiation problems on some systems.
- Webhelp export: the standard bullets have a slightly different font definition to improve the bullet display and make it larger. Table heading row background color was sometimes wrong for nested tables, if the heading row background was defined the in the table style only.
HelpXplain supported
Last, not least, Help+Manual 7.5 now fully supports HelpXplain presentations. If HelpXplain is installed, you can make full use of responsive interactive HTML5 presentations and screencasts in Webhelp, HTML Help and Windows e-books. HelpXplain will be available soon.
Please download the update to Help+Manual 7.5 from our download page and install over your existing installation of Help+Manual.
Help+Manual 7.4.2 Update
Posted by Alexander Halser in CHM HTML Help, Software Updates, WebHelp on January 25, 2019
We are proud to anncounce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 7.4.2. This update ships with several small improvements including:
- Text-to-table function implemented: if you select existing tabbed text in a topic and click Insert Table, it will convert the tabbed text into a table.
- Conditional text: if IFDEF statements were used in text, in particular in tables, a long list of IFDEF options resulted in relatively wide condition tags. The display size of the condition tags has been restricted, a mouse-over hint shows the full list of conditions.
- Images hotspots dialog: entry field for topic ID permits editing (copy and paste)
- Topic editor context menu: when the context menu was opened with the keyboard (e.g. SHIFT+F10), it had some glitches with tables and with the spell checker.
- Topic editor: the scaling message for small images has been improved, it displays % only, no text.
- High resolution displays: problems fixed for OLE objects and embedded images (PDF/HTML/DOC export)
- Double quotation marks could be entered in topic IDs, though they are not valid for file names.
- Task publishing: when creating eWriter eBooks with a publishing task, the specified skin was not used.
- Insert horizontal line: when specifying a custom style, the line not use the specified line height, but rather used the default.
- Spelling checker: support for the latest update of the Spanish OXT dictionary implemented
Please download the update to Help+Manual 7.4.2 from our download page and install over your existing installation of Help+Manual.
Premium Pack 3.46 Maintenance update
Posted by tim green in Browsers, CHM HTML Help, Documentation Authoring, Scripting, Skins, Software Updates on December 12, 2018
Version 3.46 of the Help+Manual Premium Pack add-on is a general maintenance update including fixes for minor issues and some fine-tuning improvements.
How to Get the Premium Pack Update:
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.
Toolbox utility
- The Normalize Styles tool failed to identify some styles as paragraph styles and incorrectly reported that the style could not be found. The affected styles were styles based on other styles without explicit paragraph attributes of their own.
- Some HM projects converted from Help+Manual 4 would cause Toolbox to crash and close when they were opened.
- The Add/Remove Topic ID Prefixes function failed without completing on some projects with an unusual combination of settings.
- The Rename Variable function didn’t update the display of the new variable name in some projects.
V3 WebHelp Skins
- In the layout tables function the style name for identifying layout tables has been changed from layout-table to layout_table. This was necessary because you need to define a project style for this and Help+Manual no longer permits the definition of style names with dashes in the project stylesheet. Old projects using the hyphenated style name will still work; you just can’t create new styles with hyphens. The tap images function is not affected because the style for that does not need to be defined in Help+Manual.
- Focus is now automatically set to the search input field in the Search pane whenever it is displayed.
- User-defined menus in the page header would sometimes extend beyond the edge of the page.
- If you are using Google Analytics, topic pages opened from search results or the keyword index will now include the search text or index keyword in the tracking reference. For example, if the user searched for red widgets or used the red widgets index keyword and clicked on the Introduction topic the tracking reference will be introduction.html?q=red+widgets (?q= is the standard reference for search terms in GA). You can turn this off with the new URL_QTRACKER configuration variable.
- If you are using a non-standard port (anything except port 80) for your web server the permalink function will now include the port reference in the permalink to prevent the URL from being invalid.
V3 eWriter Skins
- Focus is now automatically set to the search input field in the Search pane whenever it is displayed.
- User-defined menus in the page header would sometimes extend beyond the edge of the page.
V2 Webhelp/eWriter skins
- Focus is now automatically set to the search input field in the Search pane whenever it is displayed.
- The Open topic in a new tab function displayed an incorrect message that the topic is already open in a new tab on some touchscreen Windows devices (MS Surface and similar).
Broken YouTube videos in CHM – and how to fix it
Posted by Alexander Halser in Browsers, CHM HTML Help on June 20, 2017
With Help+Manual 7 we have introduced web-based videos like YouTube and Vimeo for embedding videos in help files. Especially YouTube worked like a charm in CHM files – until recently.
After a change in the YouTube scripts, the videos – when clicked to play – might trigger a Javascript error. The reason for this error is, that the script expects a “newer” version of MS Internet Explorer, it requires MSIE 9 as the minimum.
The Windows HTML Help viewer internally uses the rendering engine of MS Internet Explorer to display CHM files. By default, it runs with MSIE 7, even if a newer version is installed. To force the CHM viewer to use a newer rendering engine, it can be elevated with a HTML meta tag. We do this with all our CHM templates and skins, and the default elevation for CHM files was MSIE 8 so far. With the recent change in the YouTube scripts, it requires MSIE 9 or higher.
A quick and easy fix
To fix the YouTube problem, you need to apply a small change to the skins or HTML templates that you publish your CHM files with. Here is a step-by-step instruction:
- If you publish CHM with a skin, open the skin file in Help+Manual
- If you publish without a skin, open the help project in Help+Manual
- In the Project Explorer, navigate to Configuration > HTML Page Templates > Default
- Switch to the HTML source code tab
- Locate the line with “X-UA-Compatible” in the HTML code editor
- Change it to “IE=9” or “IE=edge“
- Publish your CHM file again
Old:
Modified:
This modification will be part of the next update of Help+Manual. However, your customized skins will need a manual tweak though – just follow the steps described above.
Qt Help Format Support
Posted by Alexander Halser in CHM HTML Help, Software Updates on June 14, 2017
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of QtHelpConverter, an add-on application for Help+Manual to create Qt Help files. With QtHelpConverter as add-on, Help+Manual now publishes help files in Qt Help format.
About Qt
Qt is a cross-platform application framework for developing application software that can be run on various software and hardware platforms.
Qt is a cross-platform application framework for developing application software that can be run on various software and hardware platforms.
Converts HTML Help to Qt Help
QtHelpConverter takes a compiled HTML Help/CHM file and outputs Qt help (.qch). Note that this application is not an authoring tool, it just converts a finished CHM help file to a corresponding Qt help file.
The converter is a stand-alone application and can be used with any standards-compliant HTML Help/CHM file.
For seamless integration in Help+Manual, QtHelpConverter has a command line interface to turn a CHM files created by Help+Manual into a Qt Help file. The converter application includes online help (in Qt format, of course) with detailed instructions.
QtHelpConverter is free
Premium Pack 3 and Help+Manual 7.0.8 Released
Posted by tim green in Browsers, CHM HTML Help, Scripting, Software Updates, WebHelp on December 10, 2015
We are proud to announce the release of the all-new Premium Pack 3 with advanced responsive skins. This is accompanied by Help+Manual 7.0.8 with new features to support the new skins and a set of demo Premium Pack 3 skins. Help & Manual 7.0.7 or higher is required to use the new responsive skins.
See the Premium Pack product page for more details on Premium Pack 3 and visit our online store to purchase.
Premium Pack 3: Responsive. Fast. Embedded. WebHelp.
A single WebHelp site now works smoothly on desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers, with an optimized user interface for each device type. Even large TOCs and keyword indexes are handled well on smartphones. And browsing has been optimized for lightning-fast topic loading. These skins represent the first iteration of our new online help format, which we call WebHelp 3. This has been made possible by a number of new technologies that we have been working on for the last eighteen months.
Key Features
- Fully responsive – create one WebHelp site for desktop, tablet and phone browsers
- Frameless topics – no more index.html layout page, the topic pages are your pages and their names are your URLs
- Embedded WebHelp – embed your help in existing web pages with a snippet of code like a YouTube video
- Field-level popups – display formatted popups from your help in your own web pages with simple links
- Responsive X-tables – add a single setting to data tables to make them reformat automatically on mobile devices
- Local WebHelp – deploy WebHelp locally without a web browser, even for Google Chrome and Internet Explorer
- Fast browsing – highly optimized topic loading for extremely fast browsing
- Scalable – user-adjustable text size for the best possible user experience.
Premium Pack Toolbox Configuration Utility
The Premium Pack now also comes with a configuration utility with direct help for every configuration setting when you select it. This also works with older Premium Pack skins and comes with a large number of additional advanced features for power users. For example, you can add features to skins that are normally only available in your project settings. And you can edit your templates and baggage files directly in your favorite code and graphics editors.
Help+Manual 7.0.8
Help+Manual 7.0.8 comes with a set of demo Premium Pack 3 skins that you can try out, plus support for the new features in the Premium Pack 3 skins. Help+Manual 7.0.7 or higher is required for using the responsive skins in Premium Pack 3.
Premium Pack 2.72 Maintenance Update
Posted by tim green in CHM HTML Help, Scripting, Software Updates, WebHelp on October 12, 2015
Help & Manual Premium Pack 2 has been updated to version 2.72 for Help & Manual versions 7 and 6. There are bug fixes for the CHM and Smartphone skins and minor corrections for the WebHelp and Classic version 1 skins. In addition to this, Premium Pack 1 for Help & Manual 6 and 7 has been updated to version 1.65 to handle the new popup link format in hotspots in Help & Manual 7 (this update is not needed for Help & Manual 6 users).
How to get the update:
You can download and install the updated version with the same download link and installation password from the mail you received when you purchased your copy of the Premium Pack. If you no longer have this please contact support@ec-software.com and we will help you out.
Popup links in image hotspots:
Help & Manual 7 has a new format for popup links in image hotspots, which was not identified by the Premium Pack scripts. As a result, the standard HM popups were displayed instead of the Premium Pack’s draggable, resizeable and automatically positioned popups. This has been corrected in the Premium Pack 2 WebHelp and CHM skins and the Premium Pack 1/Classic Dual Mode skins.
Bug fix in the CHM skins
On some high-resolution Windows devices the topic body could sometimes be positioned a little too high so that its top edge was behind the bottom of the topic header.
Bug fixes in the smartphone skins
Changes in the code generated by Help & Manual 7 caused problems with the links in the keyword index and search results. This has been corrected.
A new bug introduced in Apple iOS 9 prevents the slide transition between the TOC and topic panes from working correctly on the iPhone. Instead of sliding, the page would appear to turn away and twist with a strange 3D transition. This has been changed to a fade transition. The slide transition is still used on Android and Windows Phone.