We are glad to announce the release of HelpNDoc 8.3, 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 update or delete multiple hyperlinks at once from the project analyzer, an enhanced “find and replace” dialog with hyperlink searching capabilities, the ability to filter keywords to only display the ones associated with the current topic, a greatly improved documentation generation speed and much more… Read on to learn more and download your free version of HelpNDoc now.
🔗 Update and delete hyperlinks in bulk, and quickly find specific hyperlinks
This major update includes greatly improved hyperlink management features with the ability to mass update or delete hyperlinks and find specific hyperlinks by searching for them throughout the documentation project.
HelpNDoc’s powerful project analyzer can now be used to update or delete multiple hyperlinks at once. This makes it extremely fast and easy to fix all broken hyperlinks to a modified resource or delete obsolete hyperlinks throughout the project.
To further simplify project-wide hyperlink management, HelpNDoc’s “Find and Replace” dialog can now be used to search for hyperlinks based on their attributes or targets. As an example, this makes it possible to quickly locate:
- Hyperlinks to a specific topic that is about to be deleted
- Hyperlinks to Internet URLs which are not using the secured version of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTPS)
- Hyperlinks that open a new window when they shouldn’t or vice versa
- Hyperlinks to files that were moved to another location
- And much more…
🔎 New keywords panel toolbar with keywords filtering capabilities
Technical writers love to use keywords to group common resources using a common term or tag. HelpNDoc 8.3 can now filter keywords to only show the ones associated with the current topic.
We’ve redesigned the keywords panel to optionally show a toolbar to simplify keywords management: its proximity with the keywords tree makes it much faster and easier to use than navigating to the global ribbon tab.
With this new toolbar, it is now possible to filter keywords to only show the ones that are associated with the current topic: managing projects with a large number of keywords is now much easier.
⚡ Greatly reduced documentation generation time for all documentation formats
We took a lot of time to perform deep analyzes of medium and large documentation projects to understand how we could optimize their generation time. This results in important performance improvements when generating some projects.
Recently, our team undertook a large project to analyze various ways we could improve the speed of document generation. We were able to identify several optimizations which resulted in massive improvements in generation time for some projects, particularly for HTML-based documentation formats. Furthermore, as this is done behind the scene, it doesn’t require any changes to projects or templates: every project will benefit from this the next time they are generated.
😎 Improved Word and PDF document generation: better cover page, enhanced headers and footers…
We’ve identified and fixed multiple random issues with how cover pages, headers, and footers were generated in Word and PDF documents. As a result, this update produces higher-quality documents more reliably.
Thanks to HelpNDoc’s powerful template system, authors can produce truly customized Word and PDF documents by designing a cover page, custom headers, and footers… In this update, we’ve improved how templates are applied to remove some random problems: Word and PDF document generation using custom templates is now more reliable.
😍 Overall improvements and fixes
As always, we’ve worked hard to improve HelpNDoc and fix small problems and glitches to ensure that technical writers have an experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible.
HelpNDoc 8.3’s project analyzer has been expanded to report the location of hyperlinks and anchors, even when they are placed within snippets: it is now possible to access their location within snippets too.
Its built-in search engine has been improved as it could miss the first items in topics.
This release also includes enhanced Word RTF and DocX importers with better tables, pictures, and heading support.
We’ve also improved the user interface to fix odd behaviors and error messages.
🎄 Happy holiday season
As the year 2022 quickly comes to an end, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your amazing and continued support, feedback, and suggestions throughout the year and wish everyone a great holiday season and a wonderful and happy new year 🥳
Highlight of this year, we released the major HelpNDoc version 8 with amazing new features such as Word and PDF signing and encryption, SVG graphics support, a brand new 64-bit architecture, and much more. We can’t wait to show you what else we’ve planned for 2023. So make sure that you subscribe to our social network pages, YouTube or RSS feed to get notified about new releases 👍
Want to create great documentations?
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Produce your first multi-format documentation in the next minute or so.
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 major update, and feel free to contact us to share any thoughts you might have about HelpNDoc.
Change log
Version 8.3.1.337 – Release date: Dec 13, 2022
- Table borders and background colors could be incorrectly exported to HTML based documentation formats
Change log
Version 8.3.0.331 – Release date: Dec 8, 2022
- Mass update and delete hyperlinks from project analyzer: select hyperlinks in list and assign new target or clear them altogether
- Find and replace dialog can now search for hyperlinks based on various conditions such as kind of hyperlink, target, extra parameters...
- New filter for keywords: show only keywords which are associated with the current topic
- Project analyzer now reports hyperlinks' and anchors' location in snippets and can open the snippet editor to their correct position
- Keywords panel now has an optional toolbar for quick access to basic and advanced keywords actions
- Greatly reduced CHM and HTML based generation time for medium and larger projects which could increase exponentially
- Word/PDF custom templates could produce broken documents with inconsistent cover pages and styles, content highlighted in red...
- PDF footers could be displayed at the wrong position
- Improved RTF loading: possible access violation when importing pictures, better headings import, improved headers and footers import
- Improved DocX loading for tables which were linked to a table style
- The find and replace dialog could miss some results if they were the first one in the topic
- Hyperlink dialog could display fields in wrong order and incorrectly draw panels backgrounds
- Adding or renaming a keyword could cause the following exception error message: "Cannot focus a disabled or invisible window"
- API method HndUI.EditSnippetContent wasn't accessible from the script engine
- Removed option to use external importer for the DocX format: it was slower, less reliable and 32-bit only
- Readme text file contained some outdated links to external tools and compilers
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