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Review | Help & Manual 5.11
Help Authoring and More
Help & Manual is a WYSIWYG tool for creating
technical documentation and much more. It can generate WinHelp,
HTML Help, Adobe PDF, Web-based help, Visual Studio Help,
Microsoft Word, and even EPUB electronic books! You can create
documentation in any or all of these formats from the same
Help & Manual project. In other words, you write your
documentation once and then publish it in as many formats as
you choose.
What's New
Version 5 introduces a new interface based on
the Microsoft Office Ribbon. That means that you get
context-sensitive interface options based upon your current
task. Every new feature will have some users singing praises
and others cursing, but this change is perhaps the one that is
most likely to evoke a strong opinion. The Office Ribbon was a
polarizing feature when Microsoft added it to Office 2007, and
we suspect that EC Software experienced the same kind of
reaction when they added the Ribbon to Help & Manual.
Personally, we like the Ribbon in Help & Manual and found it
much more usable than the Ribbon in Office.
Also new in version 5 is native XML support
across the entire application. Help topics consist of XML
files and even Help & Manual projects are XML-based. Help &
Manual, however, doesn't require that you know anything about
XML to benefit from this feature. Every change you make to
your project's configuration and every bit of documentation
that you write is converted into XML on-the-fly. (If you wish,
Help & Manual makes accessing the XML and editing it directly
extremely easy.) The XML format also makes it much easier to
use third-party tools and to localize your documentation
because any tool that can deal with XML can easily deal with
the topic files created with Help & Manual.
By default, Help & Manual saves projects as
compressed XML, but if you choose, you can save your project
in uncompressed XML so that each topic saved as an individual
XML file. The benefit of doing this is that it allows you to
take advantage of multi-user editing, a feature that's built
into Help & Manual 5.
Another great new feature called snippets
allows you to use topic files and other files from other help
projects. You can store these snippets on a central repository
server or a NAS device and easily reuse them in multiple
projects. In today's tough economy, having this flexibility of
reuse is a great time and money saver.
If you're an existing Help & Manual user, you
really can't afford not to upgrade. The new features of Help &
Manual 5 will pay for themselves in short order. If you've
never used Help & Manual before, now is a great time to try it
out and see what it has to offer. We're convinced that you
won't find a better documentation authoring application
anywhere at any price.
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