We are glad to announce a maintenance update for Help+Manual 8.4. If you are using version 8 already and your maintenance plan includes updates until December 17, 2021, just download the setup and run it to update your current installation.

Sandcastle Import Revised

To write source code documentation for Visual Studio, Help+Manual can import VS libraries and build a documentation skeleton for all the classes and units found. The import tool is called Microsoft Sandcastle.

This update includes a revised Sandcastle import with better style support, larger default fonts and optional table styles.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Windows Meta Files (.WMF) on high-resolution monitors: WMF images have a face value of their regular size, which is actually coined for a 96 dpi system. On high-res systems, WMF files will appear larger than they originally appeared. We have to compensate for the difference in Help+Manual, which we do with version 8.4.2. This behavior is on by default, but can be deactivated with an option switch in the Editor tab of the Program Options dialog.
  Note that the sizing issue affects old-style .wmf files only. The more modern enhanced metafiles (.emf) are not concerned.
• Table of Contents: when copying items within the TOC, topics were always automatically created or duplicated, respectively. There is a new paste option in the drop-down menu of the Paste button, to paste TOC entries only, without duplicating topics.
• EWriter eBooks: the default width and height of the viewer window (like 800 x 600 px) depended on the resolution of the monitor where H&M was being run. It is now treated independent from that resolution.
  Furthermore we fixed a very rare problem that could have sometimes cause the eWriter export to fail.
• Image toggles in HTML export: the magnifier SVG symbol shown on image toggles was slightly clipped on the top and left side.
• Project Language: “Norwegian Nynorsk” was listed twice in the language list (two times NO-NO instead of NO plus NO-NO)
• Publishing Tasks: optical glitch fixed – the last task entry was hidden by the horizontal scrollbar if the main window was too narrow.
• Hard page breaks with a change of print orientation at the beginning of a topic caused a parasite blank paragraph in HTML export.
• Word/DOCX export: bugfix with Word styles
• Batch publishing: if there is no license at all (demo version) the batch export warns about no license and exits with ExitCode 99.

Download

Help+Manual 8.4.2 is available from our download page:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html

We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 8.4. If you are using version 8 already and your maintenance plan includes updates until August 9, 2021, just download the setup and run it to update your current installation.

Changes and Additions in v8.4

DeepL Translation Plugin

This update comes with a revised version of the DeepL Translation Plugin. DeepL has recently started to offer free API keys, that you can use to auto-translate a certain amount of text per month (the free contingent is a generous 500.000 characters). The  free API keys, however, require a different API address and Help+Manual 8.4 now works with both, the paid and the free translation API. Read the rest of this entry »

We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 8.3.1. To find out if this update is included in your maintenance plan, please start Help+Manual and click the “Updates” icon in the welcome screen.

Changes in v8.3.1

This update corrects several minor issues, most of them UI related.

• PDF Export: in the manual designer, the Tables section had a “new page” break option only. All Table sections now support “new odd page” and “new even page” as well.
• PDF Export: some Unicode characters were not recognized as “unprintable” (which means that these characters are automatically exported as glyphs). Depending on the font (e.g. Calibri), some characters from the upper Unicode range were exported as text though and ended up being displayed as question marks in the PDF.
• Robohelp Import: Help+Manual now supports multiple Robohelp-TOCs and multiple keyword files.
• XML Code: the LastEditedBy attribute in topic files was empty if the Windows user name was too long.
• DeepL Translation Plugin: the <list> and <li> tags were defined as DeepL-non-splitting-tags. This may have caused translation errors with lists.
• Workspaces: when opening a workspace with multiple projects, the projects no longer open with a fully expanded TOC, but are just expanded on project level. You can rearrange the order of multiple projects within a workspace by drag & drop and the Save All button (available on the quick-access toolbar at the top of the main window) now saves the workspace configuration as well, if it has changed.
• Equations: if the font color for an equation was set to “auto”, it was converted to black (#000000). Now, the “auto” font color is preserved and picks up the font color of the current text style.
• Insert Picture Gallery: if an image in the picture gallery was also included in the baggage list of the project, Help+Manual unnecessarily asked to add the search path every time.
• Impict (.ipp) Images: we added a global option in the Program Options dialog to treat IPP images as transparent by default. This will re-render IPP images against a transparent background during the export and save them as transparent PNGs.
• Publishing Tasks Editor: optical glitches fixed when scrolling through very long task lists, duplicate task names are now tested for and not permitted.
• ePUB Export: the HTML page templates for ePUB received a “lang” attribute by default.
• Webhelp full-text search: we fixed an XSS vulnerability in the “zoom_search.js” script. This vulnerability occurred when date range search was enabled. Which wasn’t an issue in Help+Manual directly, but was a potential issue when using the full version of the Zoom search engine with Help+Manual.
• History foward/backward: this is the least obvious change but perhaps the best addition in this update – when using the back/next buttons to page through topics in your project you had just accessed, Help+Manual saves the text editor position with the history. In other words: when you go back to the topic you just came from, it remembers the vertical scroll position.

Download

Help+Manual 8.3.1 is available from our download page:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html