We are glad to announce the availability of Help & Manual 5.3! This maintenance release is a free update for all version 5 users. If you are using Windows 7, we strongly recommend this update.
Help & Manual 5.3 - what's new?German User Interface
The long-awaited German user interface is available! Help & Manual 5.3 comes with an English and a German user interface. You can switch the language in the program options without restarting the program.
Improved Word and RoboHelp Import
A completely new RTF parser imports Word RTF documents with full formatting and styles. Document styles used in the RTF file are retained and added to your Help & Manual project style list automatically. Winhelp (.hpj) files are now imported with styles as well and the new Robohelp import module can read RoboHelp X6, 7 and 8 projects as well as X5 projects.
Premium Pack Update
The Premium Pack is an add-on for Help & Manual with 14 professionally-designed skins that can be applied to your projects in seconds when you publish. The Premium Pack update requires Help & Manual 5.3 and implements several cool new features, including sortable tables, a drop-down navigation menu in topics (click to scroll to a heading in the topic) and the ability to link to anchors inside expanding text blocks (toggles).
This is a free update if you already own Premium Pack 1.0. However, you need to download the Premium Pack 1.2 update separately (it is not included in Help & Manual installer). You can download using the link you received when you originally purchased Premium Pack 1.0. The installer will automatically back up your old version.
If you don't yet have the Premium Pack click here to learn more about it. You can purchase it directly in our online store.
New Command Line Interface We have implemented a new command line interface for batch compilation and automation. The syntax of the command line parameters remains unchanged. However, we have replaced the old graphical interface with a more efficient console mode that will never interrupt automated build processes. The result is much faster processing in batch mode and better automation capabilities. Please refer to the Help & Manual help for full details on the command line interface.
Version Control
We have updated active support for version control systems (Visual SourceSafe and 100% compatible version control systems using the VSS API). In particular, the manual checkout mode has been significantly improved. You don't actually need to use a VCS for multi-user editing (multi-user editing is built in to Help & Manual), but we know that many users do combine version control and multi-user editing. We now strongly recommend that you use manual checkout mode when you combine version control integration with multi-user and team editing.
View topics with your browser
When creating a new project, Help & Manual now includes an XSL stylesheet for web browser previews of XML topic files. This draft preview of raw XML topics files works outside of Help & Manual in every XSLT enabled web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer). The preview function is designed as an aid for translators who are using external translation tools like SD Trados.
Miscellaneous New Features and Bug Fixes
Windows 7: Help & Manual now takes advantage of the new Windows 7 taskbar features (pin to taskbar, progress display on the taskbar button)
PDF: better character spacing for Asian text mixed with English text, small optical glitch with colored table backgrounds fixed, improved export of OLE objects
HTML Help: improved topic initialization script automatically expands toggles containing search terms when using the search function
Text variables can now be used instead of plain text in the IDs of tables, toggles and images
Print manual designer opens with the PDF template of the project by default and fixes a save issue with write-protected template files
Text with a colored background was sometimes displayed incorrectly in HTML
Image hotspots that contained file links were exported with wrong coordinates
Improved HTML Help export of text in East European languages to include a wider range special characters as Unicode entities
E-Book command line export always created an EXE-ebook, never an ePUB format
Spell checker bug in table of contents fixed
User setting Visual effects are performance optimized is now also applied to the recent projects display in the program Welcome screen: When it is set, the program no longer checks whether recent projects exist. This check can cause delays with projects stored on network locations, particularly if the location is not accessible.
The recent projects list now displays Russian file names correctly.
Automatic image downscaling for PDF did not work when the image was placed in a snippet inside a table.
Font color and highlight color selection and display works more as it does in MS Word.
Webhelp export now requires less RAM to avoid problems during batch export on restricted build machines.
