Help & Manual Professional 7.1.0

Author-it import officially included

• Version 7.1 can read and import Author-it project files directly. This makes the transition from Author-It to Help+Manual much easier than before, because the new import feature retains the internal structure of an Author-It project.

Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Sandcastle

• We have implemented support for Team Foundation Server 2015 (version control) and for the last Microsoft Sandcastle version 2.7.2. Visual Studio source code documentation with Sandcastle has been made much easier now.

PDF improved

• A lot of work went into the updated PDF export. Version 7.1 comes with an updated PDF engine and automatically applies proper widow/orphan control to the text. Dedicated page breaks inside table cells have been implemented and a rare problem with distorted math formulas in PDF has been fixed.

Windows EXE eBooks

• Our proprietary eBook format keeps becoming more popular as a replacement for compiled HTML Help files on Windows and we have updated the eBook viewer with several new features. Now you can separate the eBook viewer (the executable) from the data file and use one viewer with multiple data files. This creates a smaller package if you deploy your help in the eBook format. Execution of external files, in particular additional PDF files has been improved.

Miscancellous improvements and fixes

• Multiple TOCs: we have implemented separate default topics for each TOC. The default topic can now be specified separately for each TOC by right-clicking on a topic and selecting “Set as default topic”.
• PDF: named destinations bug fix, tables always repeated their first row when a page break occurred in a table
• Variables are no longer sorted automatically and support multiple selections. The variables dialog window has move buttons to move variables up and down and an additional button to sort them manually.
• Impict: minor modifications
• Print Manual designer: optical glitches on 150% screen dpi fixed, undo order was mixed up in some cases
• Snippets: preview in snippet dialog calculated margins with screen pixels instead of device-independent units, resulting in a somewhat distorted snippet preview
• Insert Web Video: when the “custom web content” pointed a local HTML helper file (e.g. a video helper page in the baggage list), the video was automatically considered a “local video” and not custom web content.
• HTML Help (.chm) import: extended import options to split header and topic body, the importer now supports the CSS rule “@import url(xxxxx.css);” and parses the additional CSS files.
• Version control: Checking out a versionized repository failed (VSS, SVN, TFS). A project was not saved on close, when a topic of a merged project was selected. Visual Source Safe – the manual checkout and checkin where disabled.
• Windows eBooks: the configuration page for Windows eBooks includes an option to switch on the debug function.
• Windows eBooks: the publish dialog and publish task dialog enable output file extensions <> “.exe”. When the extension is not “.exe”, H&M creates a data package only, without the viewer.
• Windows eBooks: the eBook viewer has been updated to support the multi-data-file command line interface and extended hotkeys for runtime zoom.
• Word (DOCX) export: wrong indents in bullet lists and wrong numbering fixed, page width calculation did not take the page gutter into account (this could result in oversized graphics not exactly fitting the available space)
• Winhelp (.hlp) import: keyword index and TOC were not properly encoded when the source was a Russian Winhelp file.
• Possible error in Publishing tasks: it was possible to specify an MNL file as the template for DOCX output, causing an error when the publishing task was executed.
• HTML Help (.chm) export: standard CHM skins (black, blue, grey) triggered a Javascrip error when the print function from the toolbar was used to print the complete chapter.
• Tables with alternating row colors: when a table with alternating row colors was placed in a snippet and an uneven amount of rows got removed by conditional tags during the export, the alternating row colors were wrong.
• Search & replace find result list: copy & print buttons were unintentionally disabled.