HelpSmith Team’s Blog

We are pleased to announce the release of HelpSmith 3.0.

New Features

- Added support for Templates allowing you to easily customize the design of all or a set of help topics of your project.
- Added support for text Variables which can be used in the HelpSmith’s word processor and in almost any other text field. You can add your own variables and their values can contain nested variables, and so on.
- Added the Non-scrolling Area feature allowing you to create permanent headers for help topics in HTML Help and Web Help systems.
- A new customizable Breadcrumbs placeholder which is replaced with the path indicating the location of the help topic in the Table of Contents.
- New Web Help features making it much easier to provide Context-Sensitive Help. Now a Web Help system created with HelpSmith includes built-in Java Scripts and allows you to use special URL parameters for calling a specific topic, etc.
- Added support for the A-Keywords feature in HTML Help.
- Hyperlinks can now use HTML Help macros such as KLink, ALink, etc.
- Added a possibility to change the picture location via the Image Properties dialog-box, which is available by double-clicking on a picture in the word processor.
- The improved “Find and Replace” tool. Now you can search topic and group titles and go to a topic by its Context or Id. These search features are also available from the Topic Browser dialog-box, making it easier to find a topic or template while working on a project.
- The core of the HelpSmith’s word processor has been significantly improved. Now it works faster on large documents due to internal optimizations, includes minor bug fixes, and is more convenient in working, as a result.
- The Media Repository window can now be displayed from the Project menu which is useful if you simply want to edit the repository, not insert a new picture to the editor.
- Added a special Rich Text Format compatibility mode, which allows you to reduce the size of RTF files created with HelpSmith.
- Improved user’s manual.

Changes

- The “Open” and “Save” commands have been moved from the “Topics” menu to the “File|Import” and “File|Export” menus respectively.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed a problem because of which the media repository could not be saved sometimes. In fact, it happened due to an internal system bug, but we could implement a workaround for this problem.
- Fixed a bug which caused an error when generating the printed manual in case when the project had bookmarks with duplicate names.
- Fixed a problem with bulleted lists using a custom image, which did not appear in the document when it is printed.
- Bulleted lists did lose their custom pictures in case when they were inserted from the Clipboard.
- A Tab Stop did lose its alignment setting when being moved on the ruler.
- The editor’s Overwrite mode now does not reset its state when you open another help topic.
- The Strikethrough attribute could not be selected for text due to an internal bug.
- The Spell Checker’s “Ignore Internet and file addresses” option did not work.
- Double-clicking on a hyperlink located in a nested table did show the “Hyperlink Properties” dialog-box more than one time.
- Other minor bug fixes made.

Links

You can download the latest HelpSmith version using this link. If you are a registered user, click here to learn more about how you can upgrade to HelpSmith 3.0.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions.

We have published a new article explaining how you can use HTML Help files with your .NET application. Although, .NET already includes support for HTML Help, we often receive questions from C# and VB.NET developers asking how to do this. You will also find a simple utility module with some additional functionality making it easier to provide context-sensitive Help.

Read more…

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.

“As a topic-based help authoring tool with great features such as dynamic styles, HelpSmith is also useful in creation of Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) documents or Microsoft Word RTF documents…”

From a new article on the HelpSmith’s website, explaining how you can use your help authoring tool to supply documentation in Adobe PDF and/or Microsoft Word formats.

Read more…

So we are pleased to annouce the release of HelpSmith 2.0. It took us some extra time to test out and prepare the final build in fact. However, now I can say that everything works just fine. Working on a help file with the brand new Dynamic Styles feature is nice. I think the users who have already purchased the latest version (or upgraded from an earlier HelpSmith version) will agree with me.

There are other improvements as well. We have finally completed the Search functionality for the Web Help format, so a WebHelp system now works in a regular browser program the way as if it were a compiled CHM file and you can now consider Web Help as an alternative help format to CHM when the latest one cannot be accessed via network, for example. Or, simply refer to this article explaining how you can solve those known CHM-related issues.

HelpSmith 2.0 includes a series of minor bug fixes and improvements to the built-in word processor, user interface, and so on. Now you can also export the generated Printed Manual into your preferred word processor (a feature requested by some users) if you need so for any reason. Though, of course, it can be printed out from HelpSmith directly.

Read more about HelpSmith 2.0 at the article by R.Richardson “Help Authoring on Steroids“.

One of the most frequently requested features is the system of dynamic styles and we actually understand how such a tool can simplify working with fonts, paragraph settings, and with bulleted or numbered lists as well. Moreover, having a full-featured style system, it takes only minutes to reformat the entire help project without the necessity to make lots of changes in every help topic.

In fact, HelpSmith’s word processor was originally designed as a style-based editor, but the user interface for that functionality was not implemented. Then, however, we decided to reconsider the existing (internal) style model and redesigned it in order to provide more possibilities. Now after quite a long period of time spent on rewriting the code and integrating it with the HelpSmith’s core, we are in the process of testing the new dynamic style system.

The HelpSmith’s dynamic styles will let you create styles of different types: text styles, paragraph styles, and list styles. Also, you will be able to create sub-styles which can have the same attributes as their base style, but override that or another property such as the font color, paragraph alignment, etc. There will be a set of reserved styles similar to the one that you can meet in Microsoft Word, for example.

Another great benefit of HelpSmith’s dynamic styles is that it will allow you to redefine how a style should look in different output help formats. That is you can create a style and set alternative views for HTML Help, Web Help, or Printed Manual.

We tried to make the user interface as easy as all the rest things are in HelpSmith. The main tool to operate with styles is the style tree representing the style hierarchy which you can see on the screenshot. So when you are working on a help project, you can visually see how a style looks, apply it to the selected text, or edit it via the dialog-box.

Also, we always try to provide complete backward compatibility and the new version of HelpSmith introducing dynamic styles will open your existing .HSM projects with no problem. Moreover, all the font, paragraph and other settings that you had to apply manually will be represented in the style tree, so you will not have to remake anything.

As it was mentioned above, the dynamic style system is under construction so far, but we are going to release this important feature as soon as everything is completely done and tested out.

Since the initial release with a single help format supported, HelpSmith has become a multi-format help authoring tool with support of HTML Help (.CHM), Printed Manuals, and Web Help that can be generated from the same source help project.

In our plans for the future releases is to make HelpSmith more flexible by adding such tools as dynamic styles, variables and templates. Many of those features are already under development and will be available in the next HelpSmith updates as soon as possible.

If you have any wishes for future HelpSmith versions, please do not hesitate to contact our support team. Your feedback is highly appreciated and will help us make our software product even better.

Apart from the significant features such as the Web Help format (described in a previous post), we’ve also added a number of other useful tools that have been introduced with HelpSmith 1.5.1 and HelpSmith 1.5.2 recently.

Automatic export of topic Context numbers
If you are a C++, Delphi, or Visual Basic developer, you will find it useful to be able to automatically generate the header file with Context numbers from your HelpSmith help project. The header file includes associations of the topic’s textual identifiers (IDs) and numeric identifiers (Context) which are usually used by developers to provide context-sensitive Help via standard HTML Help API calls.
The new possibility is available via the menu command “Tools|Export Context Numbers”.

The ability to sort the table of contents
With HelpSmith 1.5.2, we’ve also added the feature allowing you to sort the whole or a selected part of the table of contents. Unlike dynamic sorting of the topic list that you can apply at any time for your convenience, this feature specifies how the table of contents’ items will appear in the final help system.

An alternative way to edit keyword references
The common way to edit the alphabetical Index in HelpSmith consists in adding keywords and associating them with the currently selected topic. However, that is not always convenient when you want to just modify topic references for an existing keyword item. With HelpSmith 1.5.1, we added such a possibility, so you can simply select the required keyword item and then edit its topic references in a special dialog-box.

Drag-and-drop support
Now you can move topics, items of the table of contents, and keyword items by the drag-and-drop method. I think this ability is a great improvement as well making the HelpSmith’s easy-to-use environment even easier.

Based on the feedback we receive from our users, we’re constantly working on improving HelpSmith. Thus, HelpSmith 1.5 released a while ago introduced support for a new help format, Web Help.

Web Help (or browser-based Help) allows you to easily export your help projects into a set of .HTML files that can then be published on your web server or put into a shared folder of your local network. This makes it possible for other people to access the help system via a regular browser program like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple Safari, and so on.

A Web Help system generated with HelpSmith includes a table of contents and a keyword index, making such a help system as easily navigated as a regular HTML Help (.CHM) file in a desktop application.

With HelpSmith, you can also modify the default Web Help layout by applying custom fonts, colors, text labels, and other settings according to your own needs.

As usually, we tried to make all the process of creating a help system the easiest possible way. So all you need to do to export your help project into Web Help is just to click the “Create Web Help” command on the project menu or the appropriate button on the toolbar.