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

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 »

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.

This is a maintenance update to Help & Manual 5 with the following problem fixes:

• Improved Robohelp import: some file and topic links in Robohelp were not correctly resolved, keyword index was not read from particular older RH projects.
• PDF export: high Unicode characters with standard fonts (e.g. Arial) are exported as glyphs to avoid display problems on non-unicode systems.
• Paragraph dialog: when pressing Enter in numeric entry fields, the last value entered was not applied.