Posts Tagged Help+Manual
Black Friday Offers in 2021
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, HelpXplain on November 18, 2021
We are happy to announce that this year our Black Friday offers start early on November 19 and will last until November 30! This is 12 days of really big savings for you: We’re offering a 30% discount on all products, upgrades and services.
The promotion starts at midnight on November 18 and applies to:
- New product purchases
- Upgrades from older versions of Help+Manual
- Maintenance extensions for current licenses
- Add-on purchases like Help+Manual Premium Pack
Renew your maintenance now for savings later
Please note that you can renew your maintenance now even if you currently have an active license with valid maintenance. By renewing before expiration, the maintenance extension will simply extend the previous expiration date and save you 30% compared to a purchase after the Black Friday promotion (or more, if you extend for 2 or more years).
Black Friday Promotion New Orders:
Black Friday Promotion Upgrades and Maintenance Renewals:
Help+Manual 8.4.1 – Important Bug Fix for 8.4
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual on September 29, 2021
This is an important update to the recent release of Help+Manual 8.4. If you are using version 8 already and your maintenance plan includes updates until September 29, 2021, just download the setup and run it to update your current installation.
If your maintenance has included version 8.4.0 (August) but does not include version 8.4.1 (September), please contact us.
Bug Fix in v8.4.1
Version 8.4 introduced a updated XML parser that properly reads 4-byte unicode characters. This update had an unwanted side effect: it doesn’t write Asian characters properly. A project with content in Japanese language might load correctly, but when saved and re-opened, the Japanese characters in the TOC can be missing.
We are still working on a fix of this problem, but for the time being, the XML parser has been reverted to the previous version (without support for 4-byte Unicode chars).
Miscellaneous Changes
- Publishing dialog: the dropdown-gallery for skins adds a button to clear the last recently skins from the gallery
- New IFDEFs for Templates: <IF_ISDEFAULT_PAGE> and <IFNOT_ISDEFAULT_PAGE> are true if the current page that is being exported is the default topic or not, respectively.
- Equations as inline SVG: the <svg> tag did not include an xmlns= attribute, which is required in XHTML (but not in HTML5) to display the content correctly. This is relevant for ePUB ebooks, which are exported as XHTML
Download
Help+Manual 8.4.1 is available from our download page:
Help+Manual 8.4 Released – DeepL, Equations, Link Lists
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, Software Updates on August 9, 2021
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 »
DeepL machine translation now available free of charge!
Posted by tim green in Documentation Authoring, Help+Manual, HelpXplain, Software Updates, Technical Writing, Translation on June 8, 2021
We’re delighted to announce that DeepL machine translation is now available free of charge in both Help+Manual and HelpXplain. The new free API developer subscription from DeepL allows you to translate up to 500,000 characters per month at no cost. This will almost always be enough for HelpXplain projects, which typically contain very little text, but it will also cover most Help+Manual projects. Read the rest of this entry »
Help+Manual 8.3.1 Maintenance Update
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, Software Updates on March 22, 2021
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:
Help+Manual 8.3 Released – Improved Asian Font Handling
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual on January 22, 2021
We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 8.3. If you are using version 8 already, this update is included in your maintenance plan. Just download the setup and run it to update your current installation.
Changes and Additions in v8.3
Asian Font Names
This update significantly improves handling of Asian fonts. If you do not translate your documentation into Asian languages, you might never notice. Asian fonts have dual font names in Windows: their native name and an English equivalent. For instance, your Windows may support the font Microsoft YaHei, which is known to be a Chinese font. On a Chinese Windows, however, there is no Microsoft YaHei anywhere, you have 微软雅黑 instead, which means the same, just in Chinese. As long as the project stays on an English computer (or Chinese, for that matter), everything is fine. Problems may arise when the project is being edited on one PC and published on another, because despite it’s the very same font, the name strings don’t match. Read the rest of this entry »
eWriter Viewer Update
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, HelpXplain on December 12, 2020
We have updated the eWriter viewer application to version 2.5.0. The eWriter output format is supported by Help+Manual as well as HelpXplain.
Version 2.5 of the viewer does not have any functional changes, but fixes a problem with a Windows 10 system-wide option, that is rarely active but could be active on your end user’s computers. This option is in Region Settings and is called
Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide languages support
If this option was activate on a Windows 10 computer, the eWriter viewer did not work correctly. Content was incorrectly formatted and images were mostly missing. Viewer version 2.5 fixes this problem.
The update is available for download from our website (link after the picture) and soon in the Windows 10 store. Read the rest of this entry »
Black Friday Offer: 30% Off for all New Purchases and Upgrades
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, HelpXplain on November 25, 2020
We are pleased to announce our Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers for this year: 30% discount on any of our products between Friday November 27th and Monday November 30th.
This promotion applies to:
Help+Manual 8.2.1 Maintenance Update
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, Software Updates on October 17, 2020
We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 8.2.1. If you are using version 8 already, this update is included in your maintenance plan. Just download the setup and run it to update your current installation.
Changes and Additions in v8.2.1
WEBP Image Format
Help+Manual natively supports the WEBP image format. You can use WEBP as regular images or toggle images. When creating Webhelp, WEBP images are exported native. For all other output formats, Help+Manual converts WEBP to 32-bit PNG images, to ensure compatibility. Please be aware that WEBP images are yet not supported by all web browsers. If you use the WEBP format, these pictures might not be visible in Webhelp in older browsers. Read the rest of this entry »
Help+Manual 8.2.0 Released
Posted by Alexander Halser in Help+Manual, Software Updates on September 3, 2020
We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 8.2. If you are using version 8 already, this is update is included in your maintenance plan. Just download the setup and run it to update your current installation.
This update focuses on DeepL machine translation, PDF output and proxy servers for floating licenses. Read the rest of this entry »