New version of Help & Manual

Adobe RoboHelp and MadCap Flare are considered market leaders among authoring tools for online Help. However anyone regularly looking at the HTML code of any online Help can see a different picture. Only seldom can Flare be found as the “generator”. RoboHelp is at the same level as Help & Manual. This is certainly due to the clearly more affordable license costs of Help & Manual but also because of its easy-to-use operation coupled with a remarkable performance. Version 6 was recently launched, and we put it through the acid test.

Text by Marc Achtelig

Inhaltsübersicht

New version of Help & Manual

Like in almost all comparable tools, you work with a comfortable WYSIWYG-Editor in Help & Manual. In the professional version you can also edit the XML code.

Single source publishing completely supports the program at all levels of granularity, starting from text variables, through snippets to IF-THEN-ELSE statements at topic level. Image 1 shows the editor.

Image 1: WYSIWYG-Editor with conditional statements and snippets

You can adjust the design of the generated online Help as you please using templates for the generated HTML code.

Along with online Help in all its usual formats, the software also generates printable manuals as PDF files, including integrated table of contents and index. You can design the layout of a manual with the help of the accompanying “Print Manual Designer”, but with small restrictions. This is the price for the fully automated publication process that ...