We are glad to announce the release of HelpNDoc 7.8, a major update of the popular help authoring tool which can be downloaded completely free for personal use and evaluation purposes. This major update includes many new features and enhancements such as the ability to insert documents and snippets’ content into topics and to quickly convert topic content to snippets, new editor and user interface APIs to automate topic creation and modification, improved HTML and document importers and much more… Read on to learn more and download your free version of HelpNDoc now.
Insert documents, HTML, variables and snippets content into topics
HelpNDoc’s library can hold reusable elements such as documents, snippets, variables, raw HTML code… this update extends it by allowing the insertion of those elements’ content right within your topics.
Have you ever wanted to create templates for your topics ? Do you have a piece of content that you need to frequently insert in your documentation such as complex tables, specific layouts… ? Thanks to this new major update, you can now easily insert the content of a document, snippet, variable or raw HTML library item right in your topics. As an example, here is how you could use this feature to create a topic template:
- Create a new snippet and define its content
- From your project’s library, right-click on the newly created snippet
- Hover over the
Insert in topicmenu item - Click
Insert content in topic: the content of that snippet is now inserted into your topic
This uses a snippet as an example, but the same can be done with a document, variable or raw HTML code. The possibilities are endless!
Convert topics content to a reusable snippet
Inserting a snippet’s content into a topic is great. But what if you do not have any snippets yet and you’d like to convert some content to a snippet ? This update has you covered.
Over time, you might find that some content is repeated multiple times throughout your documentation project, which implies additional maintenance and wasted time. You might want to convert that content to a reusable snippet as they are perfect for this kind of situations.
Starting with this update, you can simply select the desired content, right click on it, then click Convert to snippet: HelpNDoc will ask if you’d like to leave the content as-is or replace it with the newly created snippet. And you’re done! You can now reuse this snippet anywhere you’d like while only maintaining it once in your project’s library.
You could also leverage this feature to convert the whole topic as a snippet, and use it as a topic template thanks to the newly added ability to insert snippets content in topics.
New API methods to update topic’s content
HelpNDoc’s powerful and unique scripting capabilities make it very easy to automate project creation and maintenance. This update includes new APIs to manage the topic editor and user interface.
New APIs can be used to insert HTML content in the topic editor, and we have now introduced new hyperlink formats to be able to insert links to specific or relative topics, counters… this makes it possible to create scripts to manipulate the content of a topic such as inserting a list of children topics, with hyperlinks to those topics…
Newly available APIs can also interact with the user interface to iterate over selected topics, keywords or library items.
And much more…
We have greatly improved the document importers in this updates to provide a more reliable way to split documents and import anchors. The HTML importer now uses the project’s default font and hyperlink settings, while HelpNDoc now correctly warns when a document is locked by another application.
We also improved Word and PDF table generation and optimized the overall documentation generation process to make it faster with less memory consumption.
This update includes multiple other enhancements and bug fixes as you can see in the change log below.
Happy holiday season
As this peculiar year is ending, we hope that this release will bring joy to everyone by enhancing and simplifying your life as technical writers. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your amazing support, feedback and suggestions throughout the year, and wish everyone a great holiday season and a wonderful and happy new year 🎉.
2021 has been a very busy year for HelpNDoc with not less than 8 releases and we can’t wait to show you what we have planned for 2022 😉
Meanwhile and as always, HelpNDoc is completely free for personal use and evaluation purposes so download your free version now to get started and experiment with this update, and feel free to contact us to share any thought you might have about HelpNDoc.
Change log
Version 7.8.0.569 – Release date: Dec 7, 2021
- Documents, HTML, variables and snippets library items can now be inserted within the current topic as raw content (e.g. not linked to the item) which can be used to create topic templates...
- Selected content in topic editor can be converted to snippet using the right click popup menu
- New editor APIs to insert HTML content, move the cursor, check if editor is empty
- New user interface APIs to iterate over selected items in trees (keywords, library items, topics), and cancel current edits
- New link formats to create hyperlinks to specific topics, navigation or counters when importing external documents (e.g. HTML, Word...)
- Splitting an imported Word document could miss some empty topics, or create a corrupted table of contents
- HTML importer now correctly uses the project's default font and hyperlinks settings to import HTML content
- Importing a document into the current topic now correctly handles anchor hyperlinks to itself
- Importing a document which was locked by another application failed silently: an error message is now shown
- Images placed in table cells could be incorrectly resized in Word and PDF documentation formats
- All APIs calling MoveTopics (such as CreateMultipleTopics) could produce a table of contents with multiple project topics
- Right clicking on some items in the project analyzer could result to an access violation error
- Changing a table's background color using the "More Colors" dialog could set the color's opacity to 0%
- Syntax editor's gutter font size option didn't use the proper editor
- Better Windows 11 detection
- Improved the MacOS version of the floating license server which could sometimes result in a false-positive transport security errors
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