H&M v6 – skins from the Premium Pack

[Galgan]

Hi friends,

1. Are the CSS styles from Premium Pack compatible with HM v6? If not, are you aware of any issues that were fixed only in the v7?
2. Is there any skin/solution that would integrate HM documentation into the OS X native application called HELP?

Thank you. Any useful advice would be highly appreciated -)

Juraj

[Tim Green]

Hi Juraj,

1. Are the CSS styles from Premium Pack compatible with HM v6? If not, are you aware of any issues that were fixed only in the v7?

The current versions of Premium Pack 1 and 2 are fully compatible with Help & Manual 6. Older versions of Premium Pack 1 may have problems but an update is available. Please contact support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) directly if you are having problems there.

2. Is there any skin/solution that would integrate HM documentation into the OS X native application called HELP?

There is no OS X native application called "HELP" so my guess is that you are probably referring to the old "Apple Help" format. We have considered supporting this a couple of times but it is very limited and really not very good and almost no Mac applications use it any more -- for both those reasons. WebHelp is really a better solution and is fully compatible with Mac browsers.

[Galgan]

Hi Tim,

thanks for the quick reply.

2. I was referring to the "Mac Help" utility that still runs on the latest OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Even the documentation for OS X, its native apps and various built-in features (e.g. Safari, iTunes, Parental Control etc.) is written in there -) Mac Help provides indexing and uses a search engine that checks for both: a local HTML help and the online content
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac ... _book.html

Juraj

[Tim Green]

Hi Juraj,

2. I was referring to the "Mac Help" utility that still runs on the latest OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

Yes, that's what I was referring to as well. It's embarrassingly limited for a company like Apple, even compared to the equally ancient CHM help system from Windows. We have decided that it's really not capable enough to invest any time in supporting it, because it's possible to get a much better user experience with normal WebHelp, which is fully cross-platform.

[Galgan]

and back to the question no.1:

1. What we are specifically after is the latest "Premium Pack 3: Advanced Responsive Skins for Help+Manual 7". Can we use these skins and still keep the content in HM v6?

Juraj

[Galgan]

I didn't find Mac Help as pre-historic as its Windows/CHM counterpart but ok. We'll stick to the standard webhelp for now.

And the answer to my 1st question? -)

J.

[Tim Green]

Hi Juraj,

1. What we are specifically after is the latest "Premium Pack 3: Advanced Responsive Skins for Help+Manual 7". Can we use these skins and still keep the content in HM v6?

These skins absolutely require Help & Manual 7, because they are based on a completely new WebHelp format that cannot be generated by Help & Manual 6. Everything works differently, from top to bottom, and these skins are the first implementation of this format, which is still in development.

[Galgan]

I see, so the whole project must to be maintained in HMv7 and the HTML files must be compiled using the v7 HELPMAN.EXE

[Tim Green]

I see, so the whole project must to be maintained in HMv7 and the HTML files must be compiled using the v7 HELPMAN.EXE

Yes, that is correct. It is also generally a very bad idea to edit the same project with different versions of Help & Manual. Every time you save with the older version all the new features used that the older version doesn't know about will be automatically deleted from the project XML source because the old version doesn't know how to save them. It is even more important not to mix versions when you are doing multi-user editing on the same project: If you do this you can experience serious errors.

[Galgan]

I know, that's why I started this thread. Just wanted to double-check before we all start using HM7 and will never have a need to roll-back to v6

Thank you for the answers, Tim.
Have a nice day

Juraj