Gridlines

Author-it Software Corporation has announced that Author-it 5.4 has been released. There have been significant quality improvements and performance gains of up to 50% in this release.

The new release includes a number of exciting and improved features.

• The Author-it Live UI now available in French and German
• Support for Microsoft Office 2010 (32-bit and 64-bit)
• Support for Google Analytics in Web Help
• Ability to configure a default release state for your library
• Re-import functionality now includes support for Word documents
• New system heading variable can be used to display a book title or topic heading in HTML and Web Help
• Ability to filter the publishing console’s Book List by ‘Show All Books’ or ‘Show Recent Books’ options
• Ability to use a placeholder to control the word order for chapter numbering in Print outputs (especially for languages other than English)
• Updated word order for Japanese cross-references in Print outputs
• Information for working with SDL Trados Studio 2009 and Author-it XML is available in the Knowledge Center

Full release notes are available in the Author-it Knowledge Center.

(Disclaimer: While Char James-Tanny of JTF Associates is an Author-it Certified Consultant, she did not receive anything in return for posting this information.)

EC Software has announced its latest update to Help & Manual, one of the most popular Help authoring tools (HATs) among software developers. The latest version can generate Visual Studio source code documentation by importing projects from Microsoft Sandcastle.

Help & Manual 5.4 can run Microsoft Sandcastle to read your Visual Studio source code and comments, builds the documentation structure for your functions and classes, integrating the comments found in the source. Then, instead of compiling the “finished” CHM or HTML files, it transforms the Sandcastle XML data into a Help & Manual XML project, which you can then edit in Help & Manual, alone or in a team, and publish in any of the many supported output formats.

Visit the Help & Manual website for more information. Read the official press release.

Dramatically improve your end-user’s experience with embedded, dynamic help. Check out this month’s Doc-To-Help Tech Connection to find out how from Nicky, our Doc-To-Help Senior Information Developer, as she showcases the benefits of using the ComponentOne DynamicHelp control. You can also sign-up for an upcoming Doc-To-Help Webcast at no charge, download the latest Doc-To-Help software update, and find out about a future Podcast that highlights five ways Doc-To-Help can make your life easier.

It’s all inside Doc-To-Help Tech Connection.