This is a free maintenance release for all 3.xx users.
The update can be downloaded from the registered users section on our website.
Personalized update notifications will be sent during this week.
What's new?
• Version 3.4 now runs properly on multiple monitors. The windows remember their position and size correctly even on a secondary monitor.
• Browser based help: the $ symbol before the TOC and index pages of browser based help have been removed. There is now an option in Project|Properties->HTML Layout to define a custom prefix. The default prefix is empty.
• Compiled HTML Help: earlier versions exported popup topics as text and as HTML encoded topics. That is changed now, we removed the redundant HTML topics which leads to smaller CHM files and doesn't list unwanted topics in the full text search. On the other hand, you have to take care how to you call the help file from your application, since the help calls to HTML encoded topics and text popups work completely different.
• HTML Help & Runtime merging: for child help files, you can now specify the table of contents separately in Project|Properties -> HTML Help. The benefit of this option is that you can directly open a child file and it still displays the table of contents from the master file (including merged childs). This function makes it easier to implement context sensitive help with runtime merging.
• Context help tool: the context number import/export on the tools menu can now create new topics on the fly, when you import a context map file.
These are the most important changes. For a complete list please refer to this link:
http://www.ec-software.com/hmrelease.htm
Best wishesOh, one more thing... Long topic IDs (special test edition)!
As you know, Help & Manual restricts the length of topic IDs to 30 characters. While this is normally not a problem, there are situations when you may need longer topic IDs though. For example, when you import a help map file, the topic IDs should match the original constants.
We've now implemented long topic IDs in the H&M project file format and seek testers for this special version (it's not in the 3.4 update). We are concerned about the stability of this extended database format. If you are interested to test it, please email to support AT ec-software.com
Alexander Halser
EC Software Support