Posts Tagged Help+Manual
Deploying eWriter for Software Documentation
Posted by tim green in Uncategorized on February 26, 2020
If you are using eWriter books as documentation for your software you will want to open specific topics in the help from your application. To do that you need to be able to reference the viewer directly, so it is best to install it along with your software. You can’t be sure that the user will have it or where it will be otherwise. You also need to consider the following issues:
- You should always make your help calls explicitly to the version of the viewer that you have installed.
- You are allowed to and should redistribute the viewer application with your own software.
Read on to learn how to get this set up and working optimally.
Step 1: Get the eViewer.exe executable from the Help+Manual program directory
The current version of eViewer.exe is always included in the Help+Manual program directory. You just need to include it in your own installation. It doesn’t require any special installation or registry keys. It will actually run fine from a USB stick. If you wish you can rename the viewer file and re-sign it with your own certificate so that it matches the rest of your software. That is entirely up to you and we don’t have a problem with it.
Don’t register the .ewriter extension
We also recommend that you do not register the .ewriter extension as part of your installation. Instead, always make your calls explicitly to your installed eViewer.exe and your own help files. This guarantees that you are using the same viewer that was up to date when you generated your help. However, you will also want your users to be able to open your help files themselves by double-clicking on them. So read on to learn how to do that.
Consider using a different extension for your own help files
It is also fine and actually a good idea to change the extension of your help files to anything you like. If you do this, you can register your own custom extension to your installed version of the eViewer application so that your users can open your help files themselves by double-clicking on them.
Then you don’t get any conflicts if the user gets .ewriter files from somewhere else. If they open .ewriter files on Windows 10 they will get the Windows Store version of eViewer automatically (and that extension is required for the Store viewer), and then you don’t have any conflicts: The .ewriter extension is always used for the Store version and your application always opens your help files with your installed version of the viewer.
Help+Manual 8 Build 5452 Update
Posted by Alexander Halser in Software Updates on February 15, 2020
We have updated the initial release from Feb 9 to build 5452. This is a small maintenance update that fixes a couple of minor problems that customers have reported since the initial release of version 8.
- The eWriter Viewer app is now included in the distribution of Help+Manual, no separate installation required
- Bugfix toggle images: left/right aligned toggle images without image caption were not correctly positioned in Webhelp
- Bugfix PDF: some OLE objects could have caused an error during PDF export
- Optical glitch with text conditions on high-res monitors fixed
- New setting in Program Options to manually specify the link to HelpXplain
- Batch compilations: extra message about maintenance removed, task bar button removed
- Extra task bar button on Windows 7 removed
- Webhelp export: the full-text indexer did also index HelpXplain presentations, because they are separate HTML pages. Xplains are now excluded from indexing, because they are always hosted by a topic page and should not be displayed as stand-alone pages.
- When a help project was opened from Windows Explorer (double-click) and the last edited topic (which is automatically displayed, when the project opens) was extremely long, an error prevented Help+Manual from starting.
- Right-aligned images in table cells sometimes caused a miscalculation of the right cell margin
- Print/PDF problems with equation objects fixed, the debug function to highlight links did highlight dead links in green (should be red).
- Link lists: variables in link captions are now resolved
- Amazon Kindle export did not work
- ePUB/Kindle export: magnification lens for image toggles has been removed for these two output formats. The support for image overlays is too weak by many ebook readers.
Download
If you have an older version of Help+Manual installed, you can use the update side by side with an existing installation. Help+Manual 8 is available from our download page:
https://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html
Upgrades and Special Upgrade Bundles
We offer several upgrade bundles with discounts of more than 40%! The super discounts will be available until the end of February. So, there enough time to try out the new release.
Help+Manual 8 Released
Posted by Alexander Halser in Software Updates on February 9, 2020
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of Help+Manual 8, a long awaited new major release with tons of new features. Along with Help+Manual 8 goes the updated Premium Pack 4 add-on with new Webhelp and magazine-style skins.
New features at a glance
- New plugin system (PDF Review, Machine Translation)
- Floating server licenses with checkout
- Animated screencasts and new screen capture tool
- Native formula editor and new symbol dialog
- PDF: Rotated print, table of figures, HelpXplain print options
- User interface, editing and formatting
- Premium Pack v4 Update
- Explore the new features in detail
Download
If you have an older version of Help+Manual installed, you can use the update side by side with an existing installation. Help+Manual 8 is available from our download page:
https://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html
Upgrades and Special Upgrade Bundles
We offer several upgrade bundles with discounts of more than 40%! The super discounts will be available until the end of February. So, there enough time to try out the new release.
https://www.helpandmanual.com/order.html?promotion=upgrade
Coming soon: New Screen Capture Tool
Posted by Alexander Halser in Documentation Authoring, Software Updates, Utilities on February 6, 2020
We have implemented a completely new and much more advanced screen capture tool in Help+Manual. This tool supports:
- Captures on multiple monitors with different resolutions
- Multi-part captures (add new captures to the existing capture to create a single image)
- Capture animated HelpXplain screencasts for tutorials – a series of screenshots with animated transitions showing how to do something on the computer screen
Coming soon: PDF Peer Review
Posted by Alexander Halser in Documentation Authoring, PDF, Software Updates on February 2, 2020
You create a PDF file with Help+Manual, including your own comments, and distribute it to your colleagues for additional comments, which they add with their own PDF commenting tool.
When they return the commented PDF to you, you open it with the PDF Review Plugin in Help+Manual and it shows you all the comments side by side with the corresponding topic selected.
Read the rest of this entry »
Coming soon: Machine Translation in Help+Manual
Posted by Alexander Halser in Software Updates, Translation on January 27, 2020
Here’s another small teaser of something we’ve been working on the last couple of months:
Machine Translation
How to bookmark topics in Help+Manual
Posted by Alexander Halser in Training on January 23, 2020
You know, when something has been right in front of your eyes for years, it’s not always the most obvious thing. Today we got a feature request from a customer to implement a favorites list for topics. Read the rest of this entry »
HelpXplain integration in Help+Manual
Posted by Alexander Halser in Documentation Authoring, HelpXplain on January 21, 2020
We are working on a closer integration of HelpXplain into Help+Manual. Additional print options will be available soon. How about printing all slides in a tabular order? That’s something you can’t do with a video.
KM Technology, spol. s r.o. offers Support and Training for Help+Manual
Posted by Alexander Halser in Training on October 23, 2019
We are happy to announce that KM Technology is ready to provide full support, training and licence distribution for Help+Manual in Slovakia! The website is up and running:
eWriter 2.0 released
Posted by Alexander Halser in HelpXplain, Software Updates, Utilities, WebHelp on October 17, 2019
eWriter is a converter application to turn HTML pages into a self-contained Windows executable or eBook. This output format is integrated into Help+Manual as well (and will soon become available in HelpXplain). The eWriter converter application is the free stand-alone version.
Redesigned Runtime Viewer
The viewer for eWriter eBooks is now a stand-alone app. We have completely rebuilt the viewer app with this version and made it (optionally) available as a separate installer. The viewer looks more modern, but more important is the new code base which it is built on: it is more or less platform-independent.
The eWriter Viewer app is currently available in 32 and 64 bit versions, and it is listed in the Microsoft Store: