Help & Manual Basic

Create advanced multi format help and documentation.

Published by EC Software
Distributed by ComponentSource since 2009

Prices from: US$ 557.62 Version: 10.2 NEW Updated: Apr 23, 2026

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Help & Manual Basic Releases

Released: Feb 28, 2020

Updates in 8.0.1 Build 5461

Features

  • Improved Topic Editor performance.
  • eWriter eBook Viewer now includes an additional command line option to show the eBook window on top of other windows.
  • The configuration for the eBook menu now has an option to specify the color of the application menu button.
  • The eBook Viewer app is no longer signed. This is an intentional change, because the signature of the executable is invalid anyway, when packed with HTML data.

Fixes

  • An optical viewer glitch on very large monitors has been fixed...
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Released: Feb 15, 2020

Updates in 8.0.0 Build 5452

Fixes

  • The eWriter Viewer app is now included in the distribution of Help+Manual, no separate installation required.
  • Bugfix toggle images: left/right aligned toggle images without image caption were not correctly positioned in Webhelp.
  • Bugfix PDF: some OLE objects could have caused an error during PDF export.
  • Optical glitch with text conditions on high-res monitors fixed.
  • New setting in Program Options to manually specify the link to HelpXplain.
  • Batch compilations: extra message about maintenance...
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Released: Feb 9, 2020

Updates in 8

Features

  • Animated Screencasts and new Screen Capture Tool - This tool supports:
    • Captures on multiple monitors with different resolutions.
    • Multi-part captures (add new captures to the existing capture to create a single image).
    • Capture animated HelpXplain screencasts for tutorials - a series of screenshots with animated transitions showing how to do something on the computer screen.
  • New Symbol Dialog - You can add individual and groups of symbol characters to the new Custom Symbols list in the...
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Released: Sep 7, 2019

Updates in 7.5.3

Features

  • Insert HelpXplain dialog: defaults for Xplains changed to lightbox mode (this is important for Xplains with audio support).
  • All CHM skins have been changed to elevate the internal rendering engine to Internet Explorer 11 instead of 10 (this is important for Xplains with audio support to make the audio work inside CHM files).

Fixes

  • Publishing tasks: include comments in PDF was not working.

Released: Jul 27, 2019

Updates in 7.5.2

Fixes

  • Bugfix in table selection: copy/paste was sometimes confused and when converting selected text (e.g. a link) in a table cell to plain text, the entire table cell was converted.
  • Word/RTF Import: in some rare cases, an image was considered a duplicate when in fact it was not duplicate.

Released: Jun 25, 2019

Updates in 7.5.1

Features

  • Open picture dialog: HelpXplain files can be used as static images - similar to Impict pictures.

Fixes

  • PDF manuals with double-rendering loops: snippets placed directly in the print manual template (MNL) had duplicate page referrers.
  • Editing tables and table cell properties could generate an index-out-of-bounds error.
  • Setting column width by dialog window did not immediately refresh table.
  • Undo after table change could cause strange effects.

Released: Apr 23, 2019

Updates in 7.5

Features

  • Text-to-table function updated: several users asked to simplify the text-to-table function and to not apply explicit column widths. The function is now much more transparent ans simply splits text by tab stops.
  • When using the right-click text-to-table function, the default table style class is applied automatically and the inserted table reflects the table style.
  • Added clipboard paste from OneNote.
  • Improved topic header synchronization: when duplicating a topic in the TOC with copy and...
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Released: Jan 25, 2019

Updates in 7.4.2

Features

  • Text-to-table function implemented: if you select existing tabbed text in a topic and click Insert Table, it will convert the tabbed text into a table.
  • Conditional text: if IFDEF statements were used in text, in particular in tables, a long list of IFDEF options resulted in relatively wide condition tags. The display size of the condition tags has been restricted, a mouse-over hint shows the full list of conditions.
  • Images hotspots dialog: entry field for topic ID permits editing (copy...
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Released: Nov 27, 2018

Updates in 7.4.1

Fixes

  • Style preview in tables did not work on some machines with Win7/64.
  • Issues with Russian date values in genitive form (<%DATELONG%> must return the month name in genitive form).
  • Word/DOCX export: warnings about invalid characters have been reduced.
  • Topic editor: header height was not updated automatically for multi-line topic headers.

Released: Nov 6, 2018

Updates in 7.4.0

Features

PDF Output

  • TrueType fonts located in TrueType collection packages can now be embedded. Package disassembly and embedding works automatically when you opt to embed TrueType fonts.
  • Before version 7.4, TrueType collection fonts were embedded as Type3 fonts, which generated a slightly blurry typeface. The Type3 fallback option is still present, but is used only, if a TrueType font fails to embed.
  • Italic simulation has been improved. Some fonts (example: Tahoma Italic) do not exist. The...
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