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Help & Manual – A Complete Tool for E-Books
Most people who produce books of any kind work with a word processor. No matter how you plan to publish your work, electronically or in traditional paper form, you normally start by firing up Word or another word processor and typing in your text. Help & Manual is like a word processor in many ways, but it also adds a great deal of additional functionality for producing e-books and other electronic documents.
 Help & Manual Evaluation Version
Help & Manual home page
Help & Manual is a complete solution in a single program that includes all the tools you need for writing, editing, generating and managing finished electronic books – complete with illustrations, tables and many other features. You work on a “project” that is basically pretty much like a word processing file, but at the click of a button you can output that project in any one of six electronic formats, including the universal Adobe® PDF format, HTML that you can publish on a website and a special single-file e-book format with its own integrated viewer that will run on any Windows computer.
Advantages over a word processor
This gives you two major advantages over a word processor solution:
- First, you have all the tools you need for writing and producing your e-books in a single program. You no longer need to switch back and forth between your word processor and a stack of other software tools.
- Second, however many different formats you need to create (see also: e-book basics - which format is best), you just have one source text. If you’ve ever experienced the hair-tearing of trying to maintain the same text in different formats – for example HTML for your website and PDF or Word for normal publication – you will immediately understand what a godsend this can be.
In addition to this many writers find that Help & Manual is a much better tool for writing books than a word processor. Instead of forcing you to work on one long text it allows you to structure everything in chapters and sub-chapters right from the start. Your table of contents (TOC) is always visible to the left of your editing screen, and you can change the order of your chapters at any time by dragging them to new positions in the TOC. Once you’ve experienced this you’ll never want to look back – in terms of intuitive usability this approach is far superior to the outlining features available in most ordinary word processors. It is geared to the way writers work, allowing you to make major structural changes quickly and easily as you go along.
Here are the main features of Help & Manual, along with the differences from normal word processors:
 Structured documents
The basic "unit" for a word processor is a file, which is like a single chapter in a book. You can divide it up into pages and "chapters", but basically you just have one long text. In Help & Manual your basic unit is a "project", which is more like a database than a text file. This is very much more flexible than a word processor document.
Your project is structured in chapters and sub-chapters right from the start. Adding a new chapter is as simple as clicking on an Add Item button.
The chapter list or table of contents (TOC, 1 in the screenshot) is always visible to the left of the editing screen (2). To work on a chapter you just click on its entry in the TOC and its text is immediately displayed in the editing screen. To change the position of a chapter you just click and drag it in the TOC.
You are always in outline mode
This also means that you are always in outline mode. You always have a direct overview of the entire structure of your book, and you can always change the structure at the click of a mouse. At the same time you also have all the advantages of normal word processor mode, because the outline tree is completely separate from your editing screen – unlike a word processor, where you have to switch back and forth between the two modes, with different advantages and disadvantages in each mode.
Hyperlinks and additional windows
E-books are more like web pages than ordinary books, and that means they support hyperlinks. With Help & Manual you can insert active hyperlinks to other chapters and individual locations in chapters within your e-book. These hyperlinks work just like the links in web pages, and inserting or editing them just takes a couple of mouse clicks. In addition to this you can also insert links to web pages on the Internet and (in some e-book formats) links that open external windows, so that you can display additional information for the reader without taking them away from the current page.
In addition to these normal types of hyperlinks you can also create links that display little popup boxes, which are useful for definitions and other small snippets of information.
Tools for controlling output types
Often you want e-books in different formats to have different features. For example, you might want a normal, book-style table of contents in one format but not in another. Help & Manual comes with a full range of powerful tools that let you define exactly which parts of your project should be included and excluded in your different output formats.
In addition to this you can also use these tools to create different versions of the same e-book – for example one version of a training manual for the instructor and another version for the students. Once you’ve got it set up, generating the different versions is as simple as selecting "User defined 1", "User defined 2" or "User defined 3" when you compile your output.
In the screenshot you can see one example of one of these features. The red “IFNOTPDF” tag at the top of the screen is a marker set to tell the compiler that the following section – in this case a title page that is only needed in the PDF version – should only be included when compiling e-books that are not in PDF format. The end of the section is marked by a red ENDIF tag that is not visible in the screenshot. Other tools are available to achieve the same results for entire chapters and groups of chapters.
Integrated screenshot and graphics editing tools
Books are always more attractive with graphics and Help & Manual has full support for integrating graphics in your texts, in many different formats. It also comes with a powerful screenshot tool for capturing images on your computer screen, and a screenshot editing and enhancement program called Impict. This program is so powerful that it actually deserves an entire article of its own – suffice it to say that Impict enables you to turn simple screenshots into attractive graphics in a few minutes, complete with drop shadows, rounded corners, text boxes, callouts (like speech bubbles in comic strips), lines, arrows, transparency and many more effects.
HTML page templates
In addition to all the above the program includes support for HTML page templates. If you have some basic HTML editing skills you can use Help & Manual’s integrated template editor to fine-tune the HTML page templates that define the appearance and style of your e-book chapters and pages. Finally, you can also use store and reload individual chapters complete with texts or forms as templates – just as you would in a word processor.
Importing word processor text
If you prefer to do your basic writing work with your favorite word processor you can easily import your texts into Help & Manual. All you need to do is save your text in the universal RTF format. Help & Manual can also create chapters automatically during the import process – you just need to insert hard page breaks in your document at the points where you want the chapters to begin, everything else is handled automatically by the program.
Quality and Support
Help & Manual is an award-winning program that is universally praised for its ease of use, stability and its intuitive interface. Most recently it was selected as Help Authoring Tool of the Year 2003 (for the second year running) and Product of the Year by the readers of Delphi Informant Magazine.
The program comes with comprehensive documentation and a set of tutorials covering both the basics and a number of more advanced topics. If you ever have trouble competent support is available both by e-mail and on the online user forum at http://helpman.it-authoring.com. The program developers are active on the forum and the moderators are experienced writers and Help & Manual users. They and the over 800 forum members can almost always provide quick solutions to problems, along with tips and suggestions for making your work easier and improving the quality of your output.
The evaluation version of Help & Manual is fully functional and runs 14 days. This limited period may not be enough time to explore all the power of this program but you can order it safely for $279 with a no-questions 30 days return policy. (tg)
 Download Help & Manual
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