We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 6.3! This is a free update for all registered 6.xx users.

The focus for this update was on the import functions – Winhelp, Robohelp, HTML and Word/RTF import have been revised or completely reimplemented. The Winhelp (.hlp) import in particular has become significantly faster, Robohelp import reads more project details (e.g. conditional text), Word/RTF import now fully resolves in-document links and the generic HTML import has got extended import options.

The second most important new feature is about Webhelp: Help & Manual’s Webhelp has always been context-sensitive and you could display a particular topic by referencing the topic ID after the question mark in the url. Now, we added context numbers as well! Help & Manual 6.3 exports Webhelp with context numbers that can be called alternatively, similar to the context-sensitive help calls in HTML Help.

Furthermore, we have added new features to the UI to improve usability and implemented an option to exclude topics from full-text search in CHM files.

Last, not least, we have fixed several bugs in Visual Studio Help (.mshc), especially with multiple projects.

New features in version 6.3: 

• Webhelp: context numbers implemented
• Webhelp: after publishing H&M now automatically opens the selected topic in the browser (like with CHM files). This will illustrate how to use Webhelp with context-sensitivity, without explaining it with lots of words.
• Webhelp: sitemaps are split if they exceed the maximum size of 50.000 urls or 10 megabyte in size
• HTML Help (.chm): topics that start with an underscore “_” can be excluded from search (new option in HTML > Misc)
•  New editor option (in File > Program Options): smart selection. If switched off, the topic editor uses a character-only selection, more suitable for Asian languages.
• Main window UI: menus now use system font size instead of hard-coded font size. The View tab has a new option to adjust the menu font size relatively to the system font (smaller/default/larger).
• Topic editor, ruler above editor: the ruler got a context menu to quickly access the paragraph options and to customize the topic editor
• Topic editor: when making selected text a keyword, soft hyphens are filtered out
• PNG images in editor show alpha transparency
• Insert link dialog: some accelerator keys changed
• Insert Picture (Write tab): a second link to the screen capture tool has been inserted in the drop-down menu of this button for easier access. 
• Synchronize tool now handles repositories

Revised document import:

• Winhelp (.hpj) import: this function has been completely reimplemented, making it significantly faster and more accurate when resolving links.
• HTML Help (.chm) import: improved style handling, small bug fixes.
• Word/RTF import: in-document links are now resolved, one rare case of crash has been fixed.
• Generic HTML import: improved style handling and extended import options implemented.

Other bug fixes, changes and improvements:

• Visual Studio Help (.mshc): problems with toggles fixed for VS 2012. The MSHC server modifies the HTML source at runtime and inserts hard-coded image path to every image, breaking our toggle images. The new toggle script now preserves any existing path and re-uses it.
• Problem fix for Webhelp: collapse unfocused entries delivery false positives in some cases (javascript fix) and a script leak in the frame template was fixed to prevent cross-site scripting.
• Find & Replace: bugfix when doing a bulk search with “whole word”, when clicking an entry of the result list, the first instance of the search term was highlighted regardless of the “whole word” option.
• Topic editor and spell checker: the characters « and » are now recognized as quote characters.
• PDF output: named destinations did not work in some cases. Named are now all exported as lowercase. Furthermore, the strikethrough format was not placed correctly and the trademark ™ symbol forced entire line to be exported as glyphs, which has been fixed. Also changed: you can now use variables with the owner and user password.
• Subversion: modal dialog problem fixed, bug fix for German umlauts in project names.
• Project report: images that exist in baggage files only, were flagged as “missing” in the full project report, snippets located in the project were wrong.
• Snippets: when inserting snippets as a copy, the snippet styles were not correctly applied. Switching between screen and print preview did not switch the linked snippets.
• HTML Help (.chm): if the CHM window title contained double quotes, they were not properly replaced by single quotes (MS HTML Help Workshop cannot deal with double quotes in the window title).
• After performing “Save as”, some table of contents entries could become read-only when a right-click on the TOC was performed right after this.
• Minor glitches in EPUB fixed.
• Problem with SourceGear Vault VCS fixed.

Download

Version 6.3 is a free update for all 6.x users. Please get the update from our download page: http://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html

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