HelpSmith Team’s Blog

Another feature we are now working on is support for the non-scrolling area. The non-scrolling area is a view mode which is supported by HTML Help. It usually includes the topic title and any other quick information or links which are not scrolled together with the topic body. This is really useful for electronic help systems or e-books.

Unlike other help authoring tools which use a separate editor control on the top of the topic to imitate the non-scrolling area in design-time, HelpSmith will have native support for that possibility. It will look and work much better as the user will be able to set/unset the non-scrolling area easily by selecting a part of text and clicking a button on the toolbar (absolutely the same way as when you want to make the text bold or italic, for example).

With the release of HelpSmith 2.x we continue to receive positive feedback on the product from our customers and are currently working on the implementation of new features. The next significant enhancements will be support for Templates and Variables.

With Templates, you will be able to create and change the layout of all or a series of topics at once. A template will work like a regular help topic which can be edited by the HelpSmith’s word processor. But a template does not contain actual topic content. Instead, it contains variables playing the role of placeholders for the topic title, topic content, etc. The basic idea consists in that you can create templates and set any template to be used for all the topics of your help project, or set a template to be used for a series of help topics.

In addition, we are going to provide the possibility to use different templates for different output help formats. For example, if you create CHM and Web Help systems from the same source project, templates will allow you to make different design and layout for the help topics according to the style of the specific help format.