Premium Pack 1.52 Maintenance Update Released
Posted by Alexander Halser on March 28, 2012
Users of the Help & Manual Premium Pack for Help & Manual 6 can now download the 1.52 maintenance update. This update adds two small new features and corrects a number of isolated issues that were reported by some users.
New Features:
- Topic title in browser title bar. The title of the current topic is automatically displayed in the browser title bar together with the name of the project (WebHelp only).
- Accented characters in sortable tables. You can now set sortable tables to sort text containing accented characters correctly. This can be turned off for languages that sort accented characters after Z.
Fixes:
Fixes have been implemented for better handling of very large sortable tables and topics containing a very large number of expanding text toggles. Printing topics from WebHelp in Internet Explorer has been improved and some CSS improvements have been added for Internet Explorer 9 in both standard and compatibility mode. Microsoft’s standard warning banner is now displayed when help is opened using Internet Explorer 6.
Help+Manual 6.0.3 regular maintenance update
Posted by Alexander Halser on March 12, 2012
Help+Manual 6.0.3 is available as a regular maintenance update from our download page. This update mostly deals with minor glitches, but several small UI improvements have been implemented as well. We recommend to update to version 6.0.3!
Detailed list of changes and modifications: Read the rest of this entry »
Review of Help+Manual 6 in tcworld Magazine
Posted by Alexander Halser on March 6, 2012
Marc Achtelig from Indoition has written a detailed review of Help+Manual 6 and compares it to RoboHelp and MadCap Flare. Read the full article in tcworld e-magazine!
Help & Manual remains the most pragmatic and flexible among Help authoring tools even with the new version. The online Help and the electronic media generated leave almost no wish unanswered.
Direct link:
http://www.tcworld.info/tcworld/technical-communication/article/new-version-of-help-manual/
Registration open for User Assistance Conference in Memphis, TN
Posted by Alexander Halser on January 24, 2012
Registration is open for the 2012 Conference for Software User Assistance in Memphis, Tennessee!
The focus of the Conference for Software User Assistance is on developing the best possible user experience for all types of software applications through well-designed interfaces and helpful and accessible support information.
Save the date: March 11-14, 2012!
Conference homepage:
http://www.writersua.com/conference/index.html
Urgent maintenance update: Help & Manual 6.0.2 Build 2352
Posted by Alexander Halser on December 31, 2011
This is an urgent maintenance update for Help & Manual 6 that unfortunately affects most HM6 customers: when you start Help & Manual 6 on December 31 or later, it might start as an evaluation version and say that the evaluation period has expired. Re-entering your registration information does not help. Read the rest of this entry »
Help+Manual 2 Go: A Free Mini Web Server for Local WebHelp
Posted by Alexander Halser on December 15, 2011
Technical documentation, online help and manuals are increasingly distributed as HTML on CD or DVD, or installed locally together with the software. The HTML-based “WebHelp” generated by modern documentation tools like Help & Manual, RoboHelp and Doc-to-Help comes with powerful navigation, search and other features and displays in standard web browsers, making it very user-friendly and accessible.
The problem is that browsers are increasingly implementing security features that prevent WebHelp from running properly when it is opened from local drives or optical media without a web server. It used to be possible to get Internet Explorer to run JavaScript locally with the help of proprietary tags. However, the latest versions of modern browsers like Google Chrome are now making it all but impossible to use scripts that communicate between the frames or iFrames needed to display a scrolling table of contents, topics and other elements on the same page.
Help & Manual 2 Go is a mini web server that solves this problem: It consists of a single 1.7MB file that contains everything needed to serve a complete WebHelp system to the local browser – even when opened from optical media. The browser sees a normal web server and behaves accordingly, opening the WebHelp with full functionality. You just need to store the HM2GO.EXE file on the CD or install it along with your software and start it together with the WebHelp documentation.
Users then get all the benefits of full-featured interactive WebHelp locally in their standard browsers, instead of laboriously searching through PDF files or putting up with the creaky and ancient interface of the HTML Help CHM viewer. Featuring intelligent caching, the mini server is just as fast, or even faster, than loading the HTML files directly from the hard disk or CD.

Help+Manual 2 Go start screen
Help & Manual 2 Go runs on all versions of Windows from Windows 2000 and higher and is available as a completely free download. The license expressly permits distribution as long as no charge is made, also with commercial software. Help & Manual 2 Go works with the WebHelp systems of all known help authoring and documentation tools.
You can download Help & Manual 2 Go here:
http://www.helpandmanual.com/hm2go.html
Help+Manual 6.0.2 Maintenance Update
Posted by Alexander Halser on December 12, 2011
This is a regular maintenance update, which is free for all Help+Manual 6 users. The update addresses several minor problems that surfaced since the initial release last November. Read the rest of this entry »
For Delphi: Help+Manual 6 welcome screen as stand-alone component
Posted by Alexander Halser on November 23, 2011
With the recent release of Help+Manual 6 we got a lot of positive feedback about the new user interface. Especially Delphi programmers asked us, how we implemented the welcome screen.
The welcome screen is a panel which renders animated tiles over an optional background image. Tiles are semitransparent and can display images and text. Animations include the tiles popping up intitially and sliding in and out. We got inspired by the Windows 8 Metro UI for this.
Watch this YouTube videoto see it in action:
Good news for all of you who are curious about it: the welcome screen is now available as a stand-alone component for Delphi XE2 and XE. Full source code is included, of course, as is with all our Delphi stuff.
Download:
http://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads_delphi.html
Enjoy!
Help+Manual 6 small maintenance update
Posted by Alexander Halser on November 21, 2011
Help+Manual 6 build 2310 is available from our download page http://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html!
This maintenance update fixes a few minor glitches from the initial 6.0 release version and increases the Webhelp full-text indexing limit to 65,000 pages per Webhelp system.
- Technical indexing limit of Webhelp full-text indexer increased to 65.000 pages per Webhelp output
- Syntax highlighter for software code examples always used default colors
- The dropdown gallery, that helps you to quickly insert images in topics, did not work in some cases
- Webhelp output: horizontal lines were exported with color white
- In the German UI it was not possible to modify user defined variables
- Publishing (general): publishing options for skins are now saved with the project
- Problems with automated batch compilation fixed
We recommend to download the update and install it over your existing version of Help & Manual 6. Deinstallation of the previous version is not required.
Help+Manual 6 released!
Posted by Alexander Halser on November 8, 2011
We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 6! This is one of the most exciting major updates we have ever published. If you have been using Help+Manual for while, you know that when we publish a major update, it includes a lot of new features!
So, what’s new in version 6? In three words: updated user interface, Webhelp 2.0 and iPad publishing! But there is a lot more. See the pictures on the next page!

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