For example, you can use the new Link List tool to insert within a Chapter topic a link list that is replaced at publishing time by links to all the child topics of that chapter. A Link List is a place-holder that is automatically replaced in the published output by a set of links that meet the criteria specified by selected Link List options. There is a new tool for adding Link Lists. The remaining sections of this article cover my pick of the most useful and interesting new features. However the development team at EC Software has not been idle over the past five years, and there are many welcome enhancements and new additions to the product in the latest release that keep Help+Manual amongst the best of the current Help Authoring Tools. This fact will be appreciated by existing users who have learned the product and are very familiar with the way it works. Overall, version 8 represents a continuation of the "it it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach of recent years, and its basic principles of operation remain unchanged. As a result, the product has a cleaner and more modern look. However, the opening Home page has been refreshed (see below), and all the ribbon icons have been given a simpler design. The interface of the new release is fundamentally the same as before. Since version 5 there have been some cosmetic changes that have made the interface slicker and more in keeping with other modern applications, and a number of useful new features have been introduced that increase productivity and make the output better looking and easier to use. Help+Manual's underlying architecture and basic UI have changed little since the introduction of the Ribbon-based interface introduced in version 5 this is a good thing, and I welcome stability within a tried and tested product that is working well. Its strength is in providing comprehensive and rich support for all the most important features of online Help that have evolved over the past twenty years within an intuitive and well-organised interface. Help+Manual is refreshingly free of hype, and does not include gimmicky new features for the sake of conforming with latest fashions and passing trends. For example, it is not possible to create a responsive layout (including side-by-side content) within the body of a topic without using a table. However, some authors may find it doesn't have quite the same flexibility in terms of content layout as other authoring tools. It also has many hidden depths and is heavily customisable. Help+Manual is easy to use at an intermediate level, and is capable of producing very professional and polished-looking documentation right out of the box. There is a separate tool called Print Manual Designer for setting up the page layouts and front/back matter of your PDF outputs, and this is installed automatically with the main Help+Manual interface. The Webhelp output uses a responsive tripane layout, and EC Software provide a selection of ready-made skins that (with some HTML and CSS expertise) you can customise to match your organisation's design guidelines. Help+Manual can publish to a range of output formats including Webhelp, CHM and PDF. Its interface is designed to be relatively easy to learn and use, and many aspects of it (such as the design and layout of the formatting icons on the ribbon) are heavily influenced by Microsoft Word. Help+Manual is a topic-based Help Authoring Tool that uses XML as its source format. This is a significant event as almost five years have elapsed the release of the previous major version (7.0) in June 2015. A major new version of Help+Manual (v8.0) has been recently released.
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