Archive for category Software Updates
Premium Pack 5.2.2 for SnipSVG 2.0
Posted by tim green in Browsers, CHM HTML Help, Documentation Authoring, eWriter, Help+Manual, Skins, Software Updates on April 14, 2025
We have just released a small update to Premium Pack 5 that basically just adds compatibility with the new SnipSVG 2.0. All the skins in the Premium Pack now support the new animated SVGs and SVGs with embedded web video created by SnipSVG 2.0. There are just a couple of other small fixes.
How to get the update:
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.
Changes in 5.2.2
- SVG support:
Adds support for the animated SVG files and SVG files with embedded videos that can be created with SnipSVG version 2.0 and above. - Videos with captions in lightbox mode:
To comply with accessibility standards, Help+Manual now includes a <figure> tag around the video placeholder image. This prevented videos with captions from being displayed correctly in lightbox mode, which has now been corrected. - Link errors in V2 Modern skins:
Some V2 Modern skins included debug code that displayed an alert when any link was clicked in a topic page. - Social sharing link:
In individual skins, the social sharing link window opened could close instantly if it was opened a second time in a new topic.
SnipSVG 2.0 Released
Posted by Alexander Halser in Software Updates on April 7, 2025
We are happy to announce the first major update of our freeware image editor SnipSVG!
This version 2.0 is really a big update, here are the new features at a glance:
- Animations: create animated SVG images with SnipSVG
- New objects: text tables, curved text, web videos
- Create custom shapes by combining shapes
- Updated screen capture with window-sizer
Help+Manual 9.7 and Translation Assistant 9.7 with new DeepL-API
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, Help+Manual Translation Assistant, PDF, Software Updates on February 12, 2025
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.
In order to keep working with the DeepL translation plugin, you must update to Help+Manual 9.7 and Translation Assistant 9.7. DeepL will soon retire their old 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.
SnipSVG Version 1.5 for Windows and macOS
Posted by Alexander Halser in Software Updates on November 9, 2024
SnipSVG 1.5 comes with a new set of shapes: all the typical shapes required to create a flowchart. This is a first step towards making SnipSVG a versatile flowcharting tool. There’s more to come in a later version.
However, most of the work for the v1.5 update went into the macOS version. We not only fixed bugs, but made it ready for macOS 15.1 Sequoia.
HelpXplain Maintenance Update: Build 1854
Posted by Alexander Halser in Software Updates on October 17, 2024
We have updated HelpXplain to version 1.8.4 build 1854. This update does not introduce any new functionality, but fixes a problem with text objects sometimes being cut off at the bottom. If you face this problem with existing Xplain files, please re-apply the font size for the text objects affected by this problem.
Furthermore, this update handles two occasional error messages better. One error has been fixed, the second is being properly reported.
All updates are available from our download page.
SnipSVG Maintenance Update for Windows and macOS
Posted by Alexander Halser in Software Updates on October 10, 2024
We have updated SnipSVG to version 1.4 build 370. This update does not introduce any new functionality, but fixes a problem with text objects sometimes being cut off at the bottom. If you face this problem with existing SnipX or SVG files, please re-apply the font size for the text objects affected by this problem.
All updates are available from our download page.
Help+Manual 9.6 and Translation Assistant Maintenance Update
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, Help+Manual Translation Assistant, Software Updates on September 19, 2024
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 9.6 and an updated Translation Assistant.
Most of the changes in this update relate to HTML export and import, with several small improvements of the user interface. HTML export (that includes Webhelp, CHMs, ePUB and eWriter formats) is using a lot more ARIA tags to comply with accessible HTML standards.
Help+Manual 9.6 Changes
- Screen Capture: while selecting the capture area with the mouse, the mouse position can be moved by simply pressing the arrows keys. This is helpful on high resolution displays to fine-position the mouse pointer to the edge of a window.
- Screencast: the options dialog for screencasts includes a new option: Enlarge cursor icon.
- Image hotspot editor asks to save changes, if the dialog is canceled after changes have been made.
- Topic Editor: when using TAB or SHIFT+TAB in a numbered list or bullet list, this increases or decreases the list level, respectively.
- Topic Editor, Zoom: the zoom trackbar got a right-click menu with typical zoom values.
- Editor Style Dropdown: the dropdown list for the style combo box was too long in some cases and may have exceeded the screen height.
- For new help projects, the spelling check exclusion of style “Code Format” is now true by default.
- HTML Export (Webhelp, CHM, eWriter):
- SNIPX images that are going to be exported as SVG now use the <object> tag instead of the <img> tag. This enables embedded animated SVGs and object links inside the SNIPX file.
- Images, toggle images, videos and Xplains with captions are exported with a <figure> and <figcaption> combination. This also works for images with caption that do not have an ID. The <figure> and <figcaption> tags are wrapper tags around the image and are compatible even with very old browsers.
- Math objects (equations) exported as SVG are written with ARIA role=”math”.
- QR code objects are written an alt attribute: alt=”<datastring>”.
- For all videos, the <iframe> tag now has a title attribute (taken from the video caption or alt value).
- HTML skins and standard templates: ARIA landmark tags and roles added to all standard skins. (If you use customized skins, you may optionally update them.)
- Standard responsive Webhelp Skins: small change to the search script to always focus the search box when the search page gets loaded.
- HTML Help (.chm) export: if a project included Helpxplain slideshows and the temporary folder for the CHM output was not empty (because it was not deleted after a prior export), this skipped the export of this Xplain (which was correct), but did not include the Xplain in the .HHP file, either (which was wrong).
- eWriter Export: if the specified custom icon file was missing, the error was reported during compilation, but the .ewriter file could not be displayed because of the missing icon.
- eWriter: We have included the latest eViewer 5.2 in this update.
- HTML Import (affecting CHM/HTML5/Robohelp import):
- Improved copy & paste of HTML code from the Windows clipboard.
- CHM Import: better support for HHCTRL ActiveX objects. If a link uses a “related topics” HHCTRL control to jump to another topic, these links are resolved. Some Doc-to-Help projects contain such links.
- The title attribute of links is imported and assigned.
- HTML CSS with class names is split up into Help+Manual style templates . This results in significantly less inline CSS.
- Word/DocX Export:improved export of file links. External file links are now exported without a “file://” prefix, similar to MS Word.
- PDF Export/Print: if an index keyword has so many page references that the text doesn’t fit in one line, the justified text option is removed for this keyword and all text is printed left-aligned.
- Update Build 6804 (Sept 24, 2024): the executable of build 6802 contained an invalid manifest file, resulting in bad scaling on high-dpi monitors.
Help+Manual Translation Assistant 9.6 Changes
- Windows 10 long path names enabled in manifest file.
- DeepL: brackets (< >) in image captions (for instance: variables) stayed escaped after translation resulting in text like “<%VAR%>” instead of “<%VAR%>”.
- DeepL: the error message “Please note: TSL 1.2 encryption is required for communication with DeepL.” had raised a different formatting error instead of displaying the error message.
- The 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.
SnipSVG and HelpXplain Maintenance Update
Posted by Alexander Halser in HelpXplain, Software Updates on August 16, 2024
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of SnipSVG 1.4 and an updated version of HelpXplain 1.8.4.
SnipSVG 1.4
- Paste from clipboard: additional support for SVG data implemented. SnipSVG understands the ‘image/svg+xml’ format as well as plain text. If clipboard contains regular text starting with “<svg”, SnipSVG attempts to insert the SVG data as image.
- Insert SVG icon: problem with initial size calculation fixed (width and height always preferred the viewbox attribute)
- Favorites button: this button is now always enabled. When empty, it shows an info text with a link to the corresponding help topic.
- F1 help: more detailed context-sensitive help when pressing F1
- Formatting text: when applying a text format to a partially selected text, the caret sometimes vanished.
HelpXplain 1.8.4
- Creating screencasts: the layout and options dialog for screencasts includes a new option: Enlarge cursor icon. The cursor symbol of screencasts recorded on displays with high resolution (Windows scaling > 100%) had a different size than in screencasts recorded at scaling 100%.
- Paste text from clipboard: if the text on the clipboard contained HTML tags (brackets), the special characters were not escaped.
- Formatting text: if the text contained literal HTML code (e.g. “<b>Text</b>”), the content was taken as raw code, resulting in the removel of the brackets.
- Insert SVG icon: problem with initial size calculation fixed (width and height always preferred the viewbox attribute)
All updates are available from our download page.
SnipSVG and HelpXplain Updated
Posted by Alexander Halser in HelpXplain, Software Updates, Utilities on May 14, 2024
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of SnipSVG 1.3 and an updated version of HelpXplain.
SnipSVG got new object alignment functions (similar to HelpXplain, which already had them for quite a while) and both apps implement improved clipboard handling: when copying images to the clipboard, some programs (Microsoft Outlook, for instance) do not place the actual image on the clipboard, but a HTML fragment with an embedded picture. Both, SnipSVG and HelpXplain can now read and paste this format.
In SnipSVG, we have implemented a list of default sizes for social media postings. This app is ideal to create this kind of images, but you had to know the typical sizes by heart. The new helper function sets the picture frame to a dedicated size, so that your social media postings look perfect.
As a result of a dedicated picture frame size, we realized that it would be a good idea to implement object alignment functions. Normally, you move objects around and resize them as you like, then simply auto-size the picture frame. For a dedicated frame size, however, it is helpful to have the reverse option and move/resize objects to the picture frame. The six new arrangement options are implemented in the Edit > Arrange menu.
SnipSVG 1.3
- Can paste images from clipboard in HTML format
- Share to clipboard as PNG: if the picture had a transparent background, the PNG image on the clipboard was misinterpreted by some programs (resulting in a black background, not transparent)
- Share to HTML/RTF: when sharing an image with numbering tags, the numbering table used wrong symbols for tags > 10.
- Default sizes for social media postings implemented next to the picture width/height settings.
- Object alignment functions added in Edit > Arrange.
HelpXplain 1.8.3
- Can paste images from clipboard in HTML format
- (Object alignment functions were already implemented in earlier versions)
All updates are available from our download page.
Maintenance Updates in May
Posted by Alexander Halser in eWriter, Help+Manual, Software Updates on May 6, 2024
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 9.5 and an updated Translation Assistant.