What's New in 2011

HelpStudio 2011 introduces a range of new features and functionality that make it easier than ever to author great professional quality Help systems for your solutions.

Content Authoring

Floating Document Windows: Multi Monitor Support through floating document windows - tear off a document window and position or maximize it on a secondary monitor. A truly effective way to work with Topics side by side utilizing all your available monitor space.

Logo Image Support: Add a logo to page headers with a couple of clicks on the new Branding page in the Build Profile editor.

Booklets

Booklet Hyperlinks: For booklet output you can now choose between converting hyperlinks to readable links or leaving them as regular clickable hyperlinks by setting Link Conversion options in the booklet profile editor.

Booklet WYSIWYG and Preview: Booklets are now represented on the Project Explorer as another type of Build Profile and can consequently be selected as the WYSIWYG / Preview profile using the options button on the topic editor tab. This allows you to see your content using the styles and layout that will be used in booklet output.

New Pdf Engine: HelpStudio no longer installs or requires a Pdf Printer driver.

Single Sourcing

Profile Specific Templates: It is now possible to choose different templates for different Build Profiles, making it easier to create true single source projects generating several distinctly different outputs.

Microsoft Help Viewer Output: Generate help systems in the new Microsoft Help Viewer format used by Microsoft in Visual Studio 2010. The Topic Editor shows an accurate WYSIWYG view of what your Topic will look like in the generated Microsoft Help Viewer output. Author content and work with your projects in exactly the same way as for other output types - simply create a new Build Profile with the output type set to Microsoft Help Viewer.

Build Configurations: In projects with several Build Profiles, Build Configurations allow you to define sets of Build Profiles that you commonly build as a group. These build configurations can then also be used with command line builds to build a set of Build Profiles.

Powerful rules engine for filtering: In addition to the Topic status filtering options, the Rules page in the Project Profile editor provides a powerful and flexible way of filtering the content included in a particular output. Filters can be defined to filter on Build Flags and / or Topic Name and multiple rules can be defined and combined in AND / OR groups.

Localization

Improved Localization Support: Choose specific encodings for secondary locales and different spelling dictionaries that will automatically be used when editing in secondary locales. Ships with several secondary dictionaries built in.

XLIFF Localization Export: Export localizable content from your projects in the XLIFF standard format. XLIFF is an industry standard Xml file format for exchanging content for localization that localization providers can easily work with without any specific knowledge of .

Source Control

Subversion Integration: Use the popular open source Subversion source control server to provide team working and versioning features for your projects. All the rich source control integration features available for other Source Control providers are supported.

Team Foundation Server 2010 Integration: Use Team Foundation Server 2010 for team working and versioning features in your projects.

Configuration and Templates

Template Editor: Simplified and streamlined template and page layout editors.

Web Output

Centralized and Customizable Web Help Template: The resources for generating Web help can now be found in a specific template rather than in each individual template as previously. This reduces duplication and makes it easier for you to customize and extend the web help output if required. Custom Web Help templates can be created and chosen on the Templates page in the Build Profile editor.

Mark of the Web: Create local web help for viewing in Internet Explorer that does not show a browser warning bar by enabling the new Mark of the Web support in the Build Profile Editor.

Google Chrome Local Help: Security restrictions in the Google Chrome browser prevent traditional web help framesets viewed from locally installed files from working correctly. This release include a fix for this issue so that installing local web help that will work with Google Chrome is possible.

Styles

Stylesheet Validation: Automatically validate your Stylesheets directly from the Stylesheet editor using the w3c validation web service.

CSS and Friendly Captions in Style Editor: A redesigned style editor can display property labels using the CSS attribute names, friendly names or both - according to your preference.

Additional Previews in Style Picker: As well as previewing a style rule font, the Style Picker can now also show you a preview of layout, border and list for style rules with applicable attributes defined.

User Interface

Ribbon User Interface: Brand new Ribbon based User Interface. Choose from a range of themes for the Ribbon based User Interface to suit your preference of look and feel.

Window Layout Management: Save and switch between different window layouts for different usage scenarios. Save a specific layout to suit your preference for a particular task. The current window layout is automatically saved between sessions.

Dynamic Spell Check Throughout: Anywhere that spell checked content appears (e.g. Project Explorer, Table of Contents editor, Topic list, document window tabs) now features dynamic spell checking (red dotted underlining of potential spelling errors). Spell checking is also present in the Properties window and text boxes for spell checked content (e.g. Build Profile Title). Simply click on a spelling highlight (right click for text boxes) to instantly correct or ignore the marked word. Locale specific dictionaries are automatically used when working in secondary locales.

Integrated Tools

Integrated Imaging Tools: The image editor, screen capture, thumbnail creator and Image Map editors are all now integrated directly with the main application window rather than existing as separate tools.

Enhanced Context Id Mapper: An improved Context Id Mapper makes it easier to associate Context Ids to topics using drag and drop and supports Topics with multiple associated context ids.

Import

Template Import: Import your existing templates from previous versions or from a specific directory on disk.

CHM Import: Import content directly from a compiled Html Help 1.x CHM file.

Productivity Features

Nested Topic Categories: Topic Categories can now have any number of nested Topic Categories to enable you to more effectively organize projects with large numbers of Topics.

In place Name and Title Editing: Press F2 or click twice on a Topic, Topic Title or Table of Contents node in the Project Explorer or Table of Contents Explorer to rename a Topic or edit the Topic Title in place.

Thumbnail tooltips for images: Rich tooltip thumbnails for images on the Project Explorer make it easier to find the image you are looking for.

Document! X and HelpStudio Integration

Document! X 2011 Integration: Seamless integration with Document! X provides the combined power of Document! X automated reference documentation with the best of breed conceptual authoring features of HelpStudio. Install both Document! X and HelpStudio and the full superset of functionality is available within both applications.

Other Features

64bit Command Line Exe: For *really* large project builds we now ship a 64bit command line exe to remove the 32bit memory limitations.