H+M 7.3 and Premium Pack 3.3 Released

[Tim Green]

We are pleased to announce that after an unexpected delay, Help+Manual 7.3 with Tidy XML and Premium Pack 3.3 with Normalize Styles have now both been released. Tidy XML radically simplifies your XML code, providing you use styles systematically, making translation work on your projects much easier. The new Normalize Styles tool in the Premium Pack Toolbox works hand in hand with Tidy XML to further reduce XML code complexity by globally removing manual formatting. In addition to this, it can save many hours of tedious manual work when importing formatted text from HTML and CHM.

Information on the updates:

See the latest Help+Manual news blog posting for information on the Help+Manual 7.3 update. See the Premium Pack documentation for details on the new features there.

How to get the updates:

You can get the Help+Manual update installer from the normal download page on our website.

You can download and install the updated version of the Premium Pack with the same download link and personal installation password from the mail you received when you purchased your copy of Premium Pack 3. If you no longer have this please contact support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and we will help you out.

See the Premium Pack product page for more details on Premium Pack 3 and visit our online store to purchase.

[Peter Wagner]

Hi Tim, two questions: The release notes say that TidyXML is not compatible with earlier versions of Help+Manual – older as in 6X and earlier, or also 7.2, 7.1? Second question also related to TidyXML, actually want to confirm, when clicking the Apply to all topics to apply it to all existing topics: it will go into existing topics, and will remove all <text> tags and redundant “styleclass” attributes for <text> tags and links.

[Tim Green]

Hi Peter,

The release notes say that TidyXML is not compatible with earlier versions of Help+Manual – older as in 6X and earlier, or also 7.2, 7.1?

Also all earlier 7.x versions, since TidyXML is effectively a new source XML format that needs to be interpreted differently.

Second question also related to TidyXML, actually want to confirm, when clicking the Apply to all topics to apply it to all existing topics: it will go into existing topics, and will remove all <text> tags and redundant “styleclass” attributes for <text> tags and links.

Yes, but with caveats: It does it non-destructively, which means that it doesn't eliminate manual formatting. To get real benefits from TidyXML you need to use styles with discipline and avoid all manual formatting. This is because when you format manually, you must have <text> tags with ALL the formatting information in EVERY tag, and you will also have all your manual formatting information for paragraph attributes in the para tags as well.

If you want to strip out the manual formatting globally you can do this with the updated Toolbox power tools utility for Help+Manual included in the current version of the Premium Pack:

http://www.it-authoring.com/info/pp3hel ... oject.html
http://www.it-authoring.com/info/pp3hel ... tyles.html