Although this update is classified as a free maintenance release, we have implemented some really exciting new features!

The biggest news in this release is the Sandcastle source code documentation feature!

Microsoft Sandcastle is a free command line tool for automatically generating documentation for Visual Studio components and projects. Sandcastle scans the source code and builds a fully-formatted help framework from the classes and functions.

Normally, Sandcastle's output is not really editable – the program scans your source assemblies and comment files and generates finished documentation in CHM format.

Help & Manual's Sandcastle implementation changes this. It imports a Sandcastle project and converts it to a Help & Manual project. You can then edit it like any normal Help & Manual project, add information, change the structure and so on. You can also publish to any of the formats supported by Help & Manual: not just CHM but PDF, Webhelp and so on. You also get Help & Manual's other features, like team authoring, conditional output, multiple builds with command line build interface and so on.

Help & Manual 5.4 comes with an updated Manual Designer. This program is the visual layout tool for designing and editing templates for generating PDFs and printed manuals.

With this update, we have improved the manual designer and implemented many user requests. The "Manual Designer" is the visual layout tool for designing templates for PDF output and print.

The new Manual Designer comes with improved layout features: Now, when you move objects with the mouse, the editor automatically displays blue guide lines to help you align objects with each other. Objects automatically snap to the positions of other objects and the margins. You can now combine objects as groups and then manipulate the group like a single object. "Object anchors" now allow you to anchor each side of an object to the page borders or margins - this gives you "fluid" layouts that adapt automatically when you change the paper size or margins of your layout.

All objects can now be defined as PDF hyperlinks to make them clickable. The links can point to a topic, a page number or a section of the PDF manual, or to external files or a web address. Similarly, you can each section of your PDF template can now have its own editable custom entry in the "Bookmarks" table of contents in the PDF file. This means that you can add Bookmarks entries for custom pages and sections that could previously not be included, like the Index or the Contents (print-style TOC) sections.

• New/Import dialog box: Map styles from imported RTF documents to existing styles.
• TOC Build tags sorting: Build tags displayed in the Table of Contents in the Project Explorer are now sorted alphabetically.
• Dropdown toggles that are marked as "protected text" are now exported with "translate=false".
• Tables in Print/PDF: During printing, tables used to ignore their content width to enable automatic downscaling of oversized screenshots that do not fit on the print page. The downside of this method was, that tables with relative width definitions (e.g. 20% of the print width) were scaled down, even if the content would have permitted or required them to be wider.
  The new solution takes a different approach: Iit first tests whether the table as defined is wider than the available print width and only scales it down if this is the case. Tables that fit on the page are no longer scaled.
• Link dialog box: New options for copying the topic title to the link caption and hint/tooltip fields. You just right-click or use keyboard shortcuts in the Insert Hyperlink dialog.
• Project synchronization: More refined checks are now performed for unchanged topic titles and headings.
• XML schema change: Some topic meta tags have been implemented to store additional information about topics.
• Topic index keywords are now automatically sorted when a topic is saved.
• Faster editor: Internal improvements have been made in the topic editor, which now performs fewer checks during each keypress. On modern computers the improvement in speed whenwill probably only be noticeable when editing via slow network and remote connections.
• German UI: Project reports did not work with selection of one of the default topic status texts.
• Hotspot editor: Optical glitch fixed, topic ID was not always displayed correctly when the hotspot was re-opened for editing.
• Webhelp with right-to-left languages: In the Webhelp TOC, long captions with more than one line of text were incorrectly left aligned.