We are glad to announce the immediate availability of HelpNDoc 5.4, a major update to the popular help authoring tool which can be downloaded completely free for personal use and evaluation purposes. In this version, the command line processing code has been completely rewritten and greatly enhanced. It can now allow to override builds’ output path, tags, templates, variables… The inner-workings of HelpNDoc have been re-engineered as well to provide a faster and more reliable startup and shutdown experience, as well as greater future scalability. Many other enhancements and bug fixes are included in this major update: read on to learn more and make sure you download your free version of HelpNDoc to check it out.
Automate documentation generation with a powerful command line syntax
HelpNDoc’s command line interface can be used to automate your documentation generation process: choose which builds to generate, override some settings… and let HelpNDoc generate your updated documentation during nightly builds or continuous integration tasks.
HelpNDoc 5.4 includes a completely rewritten command line interface which has been greatly enhanced. It is now possible to use the “build” command to automate HelpNDoc’s documentation generation process: choose which builds are generated, override build’s output paths, associated tags or templates, customize project variables… all from the command line. Learn more about the new command line options.
The new command line options now include the “verysilent” switch to hide any console dialog, and the “verbose” switch to output additional information. It is still possible to save the log to a specific file for easier integration with an automated build tool.
User interface and internal enhancements
Many parts of HelpNDoc 5.4 have been rewritten to be more reliable, simpler and faster to operate.
Anchors are useful to create links to a specific part of a topic. The new anchor dialog provides an easier and faster anchor management system for the currently edited topic: anchors can rapidly be listed, located and deleted. They can also be sorted by name or location.
Multiple enhancements, refinements and fixes have been made to the user interface and topic editor regarding High DPI screen settings, such as some color picker which could be incorrectly displayed.
Last but not least, HelpNDoc’s start-up and shutdown internals have been rewritten to strengthen and speed up the whole process while providing room for future scalability.
Enhanced documentation generation and more…
As always, we have enhanced most generated documentation formats.
We have also added the possibility to indicate a link for the responsive HTML template’s logo and specify the version of Internet Explorer (or Edge) used by the Microsoft CHM help viewer. This is useful for modern JavaScript code such as YouTube or Vimeo video embedding.
This update includes many other additions and bug fixes as detailed in the change log below. As always, HelpNDoc is completely free and fully functional for personal use and evaluation purposes. So download your copy now and enjoy documenting!
Change log
Version 5.4.1.404 – Release date: Oct 19, 2017
- Completely rewritten command line options: it is more reliable, with additional features, it has a cleaner syntax and an enhanced console output
- Command line build action can now override the project builds' output path, tags, template and variables
- Command line can now include the "verysilent" option (ss) which won't even show a console window
- New anchor editor to easily and rapidly create, delete and locate anchors in the current topic
- Font dialog now displays a preview of the fonts
- Adding an item to the library will automatically insert it in the currently selected folder or in the currently selected item's parent folder
- It is now possible to specify the HTML rendering engine used by the CHM help viewer, including Microsoft Edge and older versions of Internet Explorer
- Ability to add a link to the default HTML template's custom logo
- Re-engineered application's internals for more reliable startup and shutdown and greater future scalability
- Document generation dialog's build list could be hidden under certain conditions
- Some color picker popups could be incorrectly displayed on some screens
- HTML documentation's search engine result list could include corrupted topic titles
- HTML documentation's index could malfunction when topic titles contained specific characters
- HndTopicsTags was not accessible from scripting API
- Enhanced High DPI support in the topic editor
- A topic with an help ID of "main" could break the HTML table of contents
- Fixed bugs in HTML based list style exporting
- Better saving of tables to Word DocX
- Better RTF Import / Export
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