How to Preview

Please post all questions and comments regarding Help & Manual 7 here.

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Kristin Hayles
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Joined: Wed Nov 06, 2019 6:06 pm

How to Preview

Unread post by Kristin Hayles »

I have been working in Help & Manual for a few months now and still don't know how to preview what this will look like on screen when people are using it. I am creating a User Manual. I need to show it to people today -- can you please tell me how to preview what it will look like? Thank you!
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Tim Green
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Re: How to Preview

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Kristin,

Unlike a single-format program like Word, where the files you are working on and the output are the same thing, Help+Manual is a multi-format program. You work on source files but your output can be any one of eight completely different documentation formats, ranging from PDF to HTML on a website to eBooks on a Kindle. Obviously, you can't "see" what that is while your working -- you would need eight different screens open all the time and also a huge amount of processing power to render all that at the same time.

In addition to that, the appearance of your final product also depends on the template or skin you choose to generate it. In your project you only format the text and other content. The layout, page appearance and everything around it is contained in separate templates for each output format, and there are a wide range of those that can also be edited.

So to see your final product you first need to know what format you are going to be using (CHM, WebHelp HTML, PDF etc.) Then you need to publish it with the Publish option in Help+Manual, choosing a template to use when you do that. There is a preview option that displays it automatically after publishing, allowing you to see it. To get started with publishing, go to this QuickStart topic in the help:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/help/hm_q ... mpile.html

For full details, see this chapter, in particular the section on the output format you are using in the Configuring for Publishing subchapter:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/help/hm_publishing.html
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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