Portable Help & Manual v4.15 Build 906

Home Page: http://www.ec-software.com/products_hm_overview.html

Help & Manual makes producing help and documentation a pleasure. All the tools you need are at your fingertips in a single intuitive environment, and the program handles all the complex, technical aspects of the process for you.

Instead of wasting countless hours "programming" your help you can focus all your energy on actually writing your documentation, so that all your working time is productive time.



All the output formats supported by Help & Manual are generated from the same project. This means you only have to edit your help and documentation once. Forget about the nightmare of "converting" your documentation every time you change anything.

Intuitive Working Environment
Help & Manual´s working environment gives you all the formatting and editing features of a modern word processor, including dynamic styles and complex tables.

This is combined with powerful features for generating and editing help and documentation files, including full support for multimedia and complex modular projects.

Your projects are displayed and edited with the same hierarchical tree structure used by all Windows help formats. The editor and content tree view are combined in a single window. Editing topics and manipulating the structure of your projects is fast and intuitive.

Single source, Multiple output
Single source is much more than just outputting exactly the same information to different formats. Help & Manual supports conditional and customized output features that enable you to include variant content versions for different output formats and purposes – all in the same project, no post-processing is required.

Help & Manual handles all the complexities of help formatting and generation for you, letting you concentrate on the work of writing. But there is also extensive support for power users and experienced help authors. You can get under the hood and insert your own HTML code, change the code the program uses to generate your projects, manipulate topic and project templates and more.

Help & Manual gives you the best of both worlds.

Generate All Windows Help Formats
You can output your projects to all standard Windows help formats (HTML Help, Winhelp and MS Help 2.0 / Visual Studio Help), and since Help & Manual is directly integrated with the Microsoft compilers for these formats all your output is 100% standard-compliant.

Help & Manual also generates Browser-based Help, PDF and Word RTF. In addition to this you can generate fully-formatted printed manuals directly from the same projects used for all the other formats.

The Browser-based Help output for web use includes a full menu structure that emulates the appearance and functionality of HTML Help and includes full-text search with highlighting for found words.

PDF output and printed manuals are fully customizable with the bundled Print Manual Designer program: You can include a table of contents and a keyword index, automatic page referrers for links and cross-references, customized page layouts, headers, footers, page numbering, covers, introductions and more

All languages of this world
This world is a big place and localization becomes ever more important. Help & Manual lets you create documentation in up to 106 languages. It is one of the few help authoring tools that fully support Unicode and can handle languages like Japanese, Chinese, Korean and many others.

Help & Manual 4 Professional offers dedicated support for translation via XML import and export.

Easy migration
One of the most critical tasks is to migrate existing documentation when you switch to another tool. And this has never been easier than now. Help & Manual imports regular HTML and text files, compiled HTML Help, Word files (RTF format), Winhelp source files and even decompiles HLP files.

To help new users migrate existing help projects, Help & Manual includes a dedicated import tool for RoboHelp® X5 projects.

More Screenshots: http://www.ec-software.com/products_hm_screenshots.html

Supported operating systems:
Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP and Windows 2003 Server. *)

Hardware requirements:
RAM 512 mb, disk space 70 mb, screen resolution of 1024x768 or higher.

*) Requirements for Asian languages:
To create help files in Asian languages, it is essential that the operating system supports Unicode. It is therefore required to run Help & Manual on Windows 2000 or Windows XP with installed support for Asian languages.

User Manual (9.5 MB): http://download.ec-software.com/helpman_pdf.zip

800 pages packed with information!
This is the additional Help & Manual user manual in PDF format.

Developer tutorials http://www.ec-software.com/support_tutorials.html

How to integrate online help into your application.
These free tutorials cover all aspects for help file integration for the most common development tools.

Microsoft Help Compilers http://www.ec-software.com/downloads_mscomp.html

Most software development tools ship the Microsoft help compiler in the box, so you may already have installed it. In case you need a compiler for a particular help file format, please download it from here.

Spell checker dictionaries http://www.addictivesoftware.com/dicts-extern.htm

The setup of Help & Manual includes dictionaries for English, German, French and Spanish. But many more dictionaries are available from this download page.

In order to use the dictionaries, please copy the dictionary files into the \Dictionaries folder of your Help & Manual installation.