EC Software has announced that Help & Manual Release Candidate Version 3.30 is now available for testing. Registered users can obtain it from the password-protected dowload page, using their H&M user name and password.
Improvements and New Features:
Native support for JPEG and PNG images: This feature has been asked for by many users and now it's available! Version 3.30 can handle JPEG and PNG images directly. This means you can insert JPEG and PNG images into your topics directly without converting them to BMP first.
New PDF engine with improved text rendering and new options: The differences should be obvious when you look at the lines of dots between the topic titles and the page numbers in the table of contents, which are more harmonious. The new engine also significantly improves word and character spacing, especially for right-aligned headings and generates "smoother" graphics in the output PDF files.
New PDF Options in Project / Project Properties / Adobe PDF Export:
Default zoom factor for the PDF viewer
Optional 128 bit encryption
New help context tool in the Tools menu: This tool lets you delete,add, import and export help context numbers.
More advanced table handling in print manuals & PDF: Tables that are too wide are now automatically reduced to the printout width by
adjusting the rightmost column, if possible.
Splash screen: The soft fading effect can now be turned off in Tools /Customize.
MultiMedia Help: A new viewer template is included with this version. The look of the template is just like the standard viewer except that it doesn't have a table of contents.
Bugfixes in version 3.30:
The Apply Layout menu items in the the H&M text editor's context menu (right-click popup menu) didn't work.
HTML & HTML Help: Image hotspots were not properly resized and repositioned when automatic image size reduction was activated for
output in Project Properties / HTML Export Layout / Image Conversion.
Printing: The "Print all text in black" option did not work in some situations.
Printing & PDF: The frames of graphical shape objects were too narrow in the PDF printout.
Printing & PDF: Some printer drivers suppressed lines of text at the bottom of the page. The problem was caused by printer drivers that returned incorrect values for the bottom margin, so that the print area was not calculated correctly. In some cases this also suppressed the last rows in printouts of tables.
Undocked TOC and reports: If the table of contents in H&M was undocked it was hidden when you generated a project report and not automatically reactivated when the report was closed.
Last edited by Tim Green on Thu Aug 12, 2004 10:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)
Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
More advanced table handling in print manuals & PDF: Tables that are too wide are now automatically reduced to the printout width by
adjusting the rightmost column, if possible.
This is nice to hear Alex, only is it posible to allow use to select the column that may resize.
Can you explane a littly more please, so i can understand way you have done this this way.
I have sometimes a picture one the right side and i do not like this to resize, only the leftside with text is allowed to resize.
In one off the beta's it has worked this way, i beleve.
I previous versions, the table was simply cut if it was wider than the print width. Now it is resized to a certain extent. Simply make the table narrow enough that it fits on the page.
Alexander Halser
Senior Software Architect, EC Software GmbH
When will be available a test version? I am evaluating differents help authoring software and I would like to view the new tol to import help context numbers.