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.