Help+Manual 9.3 Released with new ZipHelp Format

Unread post by **Tim Green** » Wed Oct 25, 2023 11:22 am

We're happy to announce the release of Help+Manual 9.3 with support for an attractive new help format called ZipHelp.

The new ZipHelp format

This format packs WebHelp into a regular Zip archive with the extension .zhelp. It is not just a help format for Help+Manual, but a general specification for an open, cross-platform help format for software applications, based on the standard formats HTML, XML and ZIP. You can package any HTML files into a regular zip archive, rename it to a .zhelp file extension and a Ziphelp viewer like the new eViewer 4 included with Help+Manual 9.3 can read it. For full details see our new ZipHelp page here:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/ziphelp/

This also includes download packages for for developing ZipHelp implementations for Windows with Delphi and for MacOS.

eViewer 4.0 for eWriter and ZipHelp

The new release includes the new eViewer 4.0 for both eWriter and now also ZipHelp files, which is also available as a separate download for both Windows and MacOS platforms:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/ewriter/index.html

The download page also includes an eWriter package for developers and other tools. In addition to this, the eViewer app continues to be available on the Windows Store and is downloaded automatically on Windows 10 and 11 when a user opens an .ewriter file.

Other updates

In addition to a number of minor fixes of user-reported issues, version 9.3 also includes:

HTML5/Webhelp output with Ziphelp support
eWriter Viewer 4.0 included
HelpXplain command line compiler: before exporting an Xplain, the compiler checks if source file and output have the same time stamp and skips compiliation if they are equal. This speeds up compilation of projects that contain several Xplains.
Import Word/RTF: new import option added Use topic heading as ID (ignores the typical “refXXXXX” references from Word and replaces them with auto-generated IDs from the topic heading).
Import HTML Help/CHM: new import option added Import text-popups as standard topics.
OLE MathType objects were (no longer) transparent when exported to HTML. This bug was introduced with version 9.2 in August.

Visit our news blog for full details and links:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/news/2023 ... s-ziphelp/