Posted by tim green in Documentation Authoring, Help+Manual, Technical Writing, Translation, Utilities on September 26, 2023
Soluling is a powerful new translation tool for Help+Manual projects, software user interfaces, web content and much more. It offers a unique combination of support for multiple machine translation services with human translators, along with translation and terminology memory. The most important points for Help+Manual users are:
For more information and downloads visit the Soluling website at https://www.soluling.com/.
Translating Help+Manual projects in Soluling is a simple process. Basically, you point the program at a HMXP project and it loads the project tree and its content in a spreadsheet-like interface. You can translate manually directly in the right column. Or if you are using machine translation you right-click in the empty target language column and choose your configured translation service. Similarly, you can also use your translation memory there once it has been set up. Any XML tags within the paragraphs are shown, but this doesn’t trip the system up. Sentences are always handled as entire units, no matter how many sub-tags they contain. This is a pleasant contrast to some other XML-based translation tools.
Translating a HM project in Soluling
The spreadsheet paradigm makes bulk translation very simple. For a topic you select the topic file, press CTRL+A in the target column to select everything, then right-click and select your translation service or your translation memory. Translating the entire project with a single click works in the same way: Selecting the project name at the top of the tree on the left displays all the translatable elements in the entire project on the right. Then you just select them all and choose your translation service or your translation memory.
The integration of translation and terminology memory is another major feature of Soluling. Once you are satisfied with your translation you can save it to the integrated translation memory database for your project. When the Help+Manual project is updated you just need to apply the translation memory to get perfect translations for all the text that hasn’t changed. Then you only need to work on what is new and changed.
By default, translation memory works with sentences as the basic unit, but you can also configure Soluling to handle phrases and other meaningful language units in the translation memory. It is extensively and minutely configurable, like everything else in this impressive tool. And in addition to your own translation memory database, Soluling can also integrate the Microsoft Terminology Service and the MyMemory translation memory service.
Similarly, you can also configure a terminology database that will automatically translate any defined terms in the predefined way for maximum consistency. And here too, you can combine your own database with the Microsoft Terminology Service.
Soluling supports working on your translation projects in teams. You can generate Soluling packages to send to multiple translators and then integrate their results into your main project. And the translation memory and terminology databases can be maintained as cloud-based versions so that all translators can access them directly.
This goes beyond the scope of this review, but as already mentioned, Soluling isn’t only for translating Help+Manual projects, web content and a total of over 100 other different input formats. It is also a full software localization tool, with a complete set of powerful and configurable features for translating and localizing the entire user interface of your application. Visit the Soluling website for more information on this.
Posted by Alexander Halser in eWriter, Help+Manual, WebHelp on September 18, 2023
We have updated eWriter Viewer to version 4. Both, the Windows and MacOS versions are available from the eWriter download page. Viewer redistributables have been updated as well:
https://www.helpandmanual.com/ewriter/
On the surface, Ziphelp is HTML5 in a zip archive. Pack any folder with HTML pages into a regular zip file, rename the extension to “.zhelp” and the eWriter viewer will open it. This not just works for Help+Manual’s Webhelp output, but for any HTML.
But Ziphelp is more than that, it is a protocol based on the standard sitemap protocol, designed to give a help viewer extended information about the content of the help system, in order to provide context-sensitive help to an application. Locally, on the web, and mixed.
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, Software Updates on August 12, 2023
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 9.2 and Translation Assistant 9.2!
This maintenance update is mostly about convenience functions. Take the Find & Replace dialog as an example: the selection of the search range are now 3 buttons instead of a combo box and for text searches in the current topic, a “wrap around” option has been added.
All updates are available from our download page.
Posted by tim green in Browsers, CHM HTML Help, Documentation Authoring, eWriter, Help+Manual, Skins, Software Updates, Technical Writing, Utilities on July 12, 2023
We’re glad to announce the update of the Help+Manual Premium Pack add-on to version 5.1.0. This update includes a number of small but significant improvements to almost all the skins and is recommended for all users.
You can download and install the update with the link and credentials you received when you purchased. If you no longer have these, just contact support by email and we will help you out.
Posted by tim green in Documentation Authoring, Help+Manual, HelpXplain, Software Updates, Technical Writing on May 11, 2023
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been testing Help+Manual and related tools on the latest version of Windows 11 for ARM running on an M1 Mac under the new Parallels 18 virtual machine program.
I can cautiously recommend Parallels 18 for running Help+Manual and its necessary helper programs under the current and latest version of Windows 11 for ARM. Earlier versions of Windows 11 ARM and earlier versions of Parallels will NOT work satisfactorily, but these latest versions appear to be surprisingly good.
Warning: It is still early days, so this recommendation remains cautious. Even though everything appears to be stable, I still wouldn’t yet depend on it if I was buying a new computer as my only machine. However, I would already feel pretty good about using this as a second machine, provided I had a genuine, Intel-based Windows machine as a backup.
Posted by tim green in Browsers, CHM HTML Help, eWriter, Help+Manual, Skins, Software Updates, Utilities on April 27, 2023
We have released a small update of Premium Pack 5 to version 5.0.4 with some maintenance changes and minor improvements.
You can download and install the update with the link and credentials you received when you purchased. If you no longer have these, just contact support by email and we will help you out.
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, Software Updates, Translation on April 8, 2023
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 9.1 and Translation Assistant 9.1.
All updates are available from our download page.
Posted by tim green in Documentation Authoring, Help+Manual, Technical Writing, Training on February 24, 2023
A while ago we reported about the online HM-based technical writing courses offered by Subash Sarath via his site Learn Tech Writing Fast. In the meantime, Subash has produced a video course that is now available on YouTube free of charge. You can access the course on his YouTube channel here (click the image to visit):
We should note that this is a fully independent production in which we did not participate ourselves. We would be interested to hear any feedback, which you can send to the regular EC Software support address or post on the user forum.
Posted by Alexander Halser in eWriter, Help+Manual on February 9, 2023
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 9.03 and Translation Assistant 9.03.
All updates are available from our download page.
Posted by Alexander Halser in eWriter, Help+Manual, Software Updates on December 16, 2022
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 9.02 and Translation Assistant 9.02.
Version 9.0.2 comes with an optional French user interface. This is a somewhat risky step for us, because nobody here speaks French and we neither can evaluate the quality of the translation, nor can we provide email support in French. But we wanted to give to a try, though. Please consider the French user interface as “beta test”, you can always switch back to English, if something doesn’t work. The translation is courtesy of Christophe Willefert, a French user of Help+Manual. Translation errors are courtesy of EC Software.
We expect this to be the last update for 2022 and wish all our customers around the world a happy and peaceful holiday season! Read the rest of this entry »