Help+Manual News

As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, we have released a maintenance update for Help+Manual 7.3,6. We encourage you to install this maintenance release over your existing version of Help+Manual.

Bug Fixes and Improvements in 7.3.6

General / User Interface

• Project report with unused images: toggle icons for expanded view were reported as “unused”, although they were in fact used by the project.
• Dropdown toggles: if a dedicated “Print” icon was specified for the toggle object, the icon file was not automatically copied to the project folder.
• Publishing Tasks Dialog: The More menu has an additional entry to directly open the specified output folder of the selected task. Bug fix: task options were not saved for EXE eBooks.
• Insert Image Hotspots dialog: DEL key did not work in edit fields

HTML Publishing

• YouTube videos did no longer work in CHM files: Because of changes on the YouTube servers, that dropped support for MS Internet Explorer 9. When viewing a CHM file, the display engine in the HTML Help viewer is MSIE. The internal MSIE viewer is now by default elevated to run as IE10, which fixes the problem with YouTube videos in CHM files.
• Inline CSS in HTML-based export formats: We have removed most of the (remaining) inline CSS for bullet lists, numbered lists and tables. Help+Manual now exports lists as text with classes, referring to the paragraph classes they belong to. When exporting “lists as lists” (not recommended), Help+Manual does not apply any inline CSS anymore, to make it easier to format list with custom global CSS.
  Tables are exported with style classes: tables refer to global table styles instead of using inline CSS.
• Date and Time variables: The variable <%DATELONG%> now returns month names in the genitive form, instead of the nominative form.  In English and many other Roman languages, there is no difference between the genitive and the nominative form, so you might not notice any change. In some languages like Russian, however, the months are spelled and pronounced differently in genitive form.
  Furthermore, we have implemented a new formatted variable: <%DATE(formatstring)%>
• Webhelp export: Topic IDs that start with an underscore (“_”) are now excluded from the sitemap. These topics are generally excluded from the full-text search and should not occur in the sitemap, either.
• Wingdings bullet #158 was internally saved as #382 and was exported wrong in HTML
• HTML export (all formats): The list of baggage files was exported too early. It was not possible to overwrite the default CSS file (default.css) with a custom version, because that CSS was created after the baggage files export.
• EPUB and Kindle eBooks: In the page template and TOC template defaults, the white background color “#FFFFFF” has been removed. In the default CSS style sheet, the black text color for base styles has been removed. Both changes should enable the ePUB reader to switch the colors in night mode.

PDF Publishing

• Better integration of Type3 font encoding. Vertical offset for the Segoe UI font in Type3 embedding mode fixed.
• Some rare character spacing problems fixed
•  If the specified print manual template does not exist, Help+Manual stops with an error instead of gracefully using the default template.
• Bug with multiple IFDEFs in single-column tables fixed: if the first item was an IFDEF and the last item was an END and there were multiple IF-END but not nested, the row was removed.

Update Build 4521 (July 3, 2018):

• Small bugfix for XML browser preview of project source files
• Table header colors were not exported for tables without style

Please download the update to Help+Manual 7.3.6 from our download page and install over your existing installation of Help+Manual.

With version 7.3.4 released last week, we had introduced a really bad bug: tables with background images could not be read anymore. This problem has been fixed with the new version 7.3.4 build 4380.

Changes in build 4380

• Tables with background images could not be read. If a topic contained a table with a background image, Help+Manual issued an error and said it could not read the XML data. The topic was truncated starting with this table.
• AuthorIT import: bug fix for embedded images – some embedded images could not be extracted when importing an AuthorIT project.
• Insert Conditional Text: with 7.3.4 we introduced a feature to remember the last condition used, to make it simplier to insert new conditional text tags. This feature turned out to have a backlash – other users complained about this feature being counter-productive and not supporting the workflow. The remember function has been removed with build 4380.

Download the Help+Manual Update:

Please download the update to Help+Manual 7.3.4 from our download page and install over your existing installation of Help+Manual.

First of all: a Happy New Year to everybody who’s reading this newsblog!

We have been busy during the holiday season and completed Help+Manual 7.3.4, a free maintenance update for all 7.xx users. We encourage you to install this maintenance release over your existing version of Help+Manual.

New Features and Bug Fixes

• Insert Image Hotspots: the hotspot editor now supports a zoom function to make it easier to work on hotspots on high-resolution monitors.
• PDF/Print Manuals: the manual template designer has an extra option for keyword index separators (normally, those A – Z sections in the keyword index). Keyword sections can be created automatically from the actual keyword index. This improves the compatibiltity of PDF templates with projects in multiple languages.
• Topic Editor: optical glitch removed when zoom was > 150%
• Project Report: moving unused images to a backup folder did not work if the folder path contained an ampersand character.
• Publishing Windows eBooks: additional check implemented whether the output file can be replaced/overwritten. Publishing an eBook could have triggered an error, if the target file was opened before the publishing task completed.

Download the Help+Manual Update:

Please download the update to Help+Manual 7.3.4 from our download page and install over your existing installation of Help+Manual.

We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 7.3,3, which is a free update for all 7.xx users. We encourage you to install this maintenance release over your existing version of Help+Manual.
At the same time we have also released version 3.41 of the Help+Manual Premium Pack with three small but important corrections. See further below for details.

Delayed Execution on Windows 10 FCU

If you have installed the latest Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (FCU), you might notice a general slowdown in some situations, not just with Help+Manual, but with a large range of Windows software including Microsoft’s own tools and utilities. One particular situation, where this can be observed is the publish options configuration page for MS Word export. Opening this page on Win 10 FCU might have taken several seconds, it looked as if Help+Manual had frozen:

Version 7.3.3 fixes this problem and should revert to normal speed.

New Features and Changes

• Keyword Idex Tool: improved display when searching for a particular keyword
• Insert Snippet Dialog: remembers the option to insert a snippet inline or on a new line
• Webhelp full-text search: the default word length limit of 35 characters has been extended
• Code Editor for Baggage files: support for .PHP and .ASP implemented
• AuthorIT Import: context numbers were missing in some cases
• Inline text toggles: when printed expanded, it was possible that the hidden text was inserted twice, depending on certain conditional-text options.
• MS Word / DOCX Export: small bug with invalid characters in text fixed
• XML keyword index: when the XML data contained whitespace in second-level keywords, the whitespace was interpreted as a blank keyword

Download the Help+Manual Update:

Please download the update to Help+Manual 7.3.3 from our download page and install over your existing installation of Help+Manual.

Premium Pack 3.41 Maintenance Update

This update includes these three fixes:

• Compatibility with new Firefox: A change was needed in the V3 skins to prevent some clickable items from being disabled on Windows touch screen devices in the major new Firefox update.
• Index entries with multiple references: If a keyword index entry has multiple entries the list is now displayed in a positioned box with scrollbars.
• Removal of internal window name: An unnecessary internal window name in the V3 skins prevented opening successive URLs to the WebHelp in the same window from a web application.

You can download the Premium Pack update with the link and credentials you received when you purchased. If you no longer have these please contact support and we will send you a copy.