What's new in HelpXplain 1.8.2.1850
Mar 11, 2024
- Image Crop Tool: new rounded corners button implemented
- Powerpoint Import: German umlauts and some special characters were not converted correctly
New in HelpXplain 1.8.1.1840 (Feb 4, 2024)
- Improved mouse wheel and trackpad support: mouse scroll works with 4-directional mouse and with SHIFT + mouse wheel. Trackpad gestures for left/right and up/down swipe as well as pinch-to-zoom implemented.
- New SVG library implemented: if you add SVG images to slides in HelpXplain, the design-time display offers better support for gradients and shadows.
- Object shadows: small modifications to match SVG shadows more closely with design time.
- Copy & Paste operations: updated for compatibility with SnipSVG. You can copy & paste individual objects between SnipSVG and HelpXplain.
New in HelpXplain 1.8.0.1830 (Nov 24, 2023)
- Favorites Tool and Format Painter:
- We have implemented a favorites tool, where you can store objects that you want to re-insert regularly. This is a very comfortable function to store customized objects and have them ready for insertion whenever you need them. Favorites are stored in a hidden Xplain file, which you can open and edit to modify your favorites list.
- Minor Changes and bug fixes in v1.8:
- New additional numbering steps – with text label attached
- Canvas background: a transparent background option has been added. This option is less important for animated presentations. But if you use HelpXplain to annotate screenshots, it creates transparent PNG files.
- Object Shadows can now be centered as well
- Shadow direction is displayed independently from the object rotation (and keeps its position when rotating the object)
- Function “Fit Slide to Objects” improved: it’s more exact and uses a more detailed positioning analysis.
- Shape text editor: F2 starts edit and ESC cancels edit
- Command line compiler XplainCmd.exe can now export single-slide Xplains to SVG
- HelpXplain can open and edit .SnipX files (more on that later)
- Bug fix: a change of line caps was not restored by the undo function
- Bug fix: undo did not work after image modification with the Skew tool
- Bug fix for multiple instances of HelpXplain (64 bit only)
- Bug fix in script file: when slides were made invisible in HelpXplain, the slide index was mixed up in the output HTML file, causing slide animations not to run.
New in HelpXplain 1.7.1.1761 (Oct 22, 2023)
- Support for Ziphelp in the Publish dialog
- Three new line types: bent curve, s-curve and zigzag
- When inserting an overview slide, the function optionally inserts links to all other slides
New in HelpXplain 1.7.0.1720 (Jul 2, 2023)
- HelpXplain is now 64 bit. The setup includes both the 32 and 64 bit versions with English and German user interface.
- The setup can install either for all users (requires admin rights) or just for the current user (without admin rights).
- You can choose the examples folder during the setup.
- Insert shape dialog: new basic shapes, new numbering tags with auto-numbering in several styles!
- Callout shapes support multiple pointers.
- You can export a single slide in SVG format (in addition to JPEG/PNG/etc.).
- DeepL translation adds 5 new languges: Turkish, Ukrainian, Indonesian, Norwegian (Bokmål) and Korean.
- Several minor issues fixed (mostly drawing glitches on high-resolution monitors).
- New Features in Detail:
- The really big news are new numbering tags with auto-numbering and callouts with support for multiple pointers. Internally, the numbering tags are treated like callouts and support multiple pointers as well
- Another new feature is a little bit hidden, but nonetheless an important one. HelpXplain can export a single slide in SVG format, in addition to PNG/JPEG/etc. SVG is a scalable vector graphic that you can use on any web page, including documentation created with Help+Manual. HelpXplain embeds all data from the slide and creates a single SVG file with no external dependencies. The beauty of SVG is that it freely scales, which means that the content of the picture scales to whatever resolution is required.
New in HelpXplain 1.6.0.1470 (Mar 3, 2022)
- This maintenance update fixes a couple of small bugs.
- Script errors: Typewriter animations of text were invisible when played again, fade-in animations that were placed on the very first slide and started at 0:00 seconds became invisible in subsequent loops.
- Screen Capture tool: optical glitches fixed in screen capture UI, when Windows UI style was set to “classic” Win2000 style (this causes Windows to switch off Aero and transparent drawing, which parts of the UI have relied on).
- User Interface: optical glitches in UI fixed when Windows UI style was set to “classic” Win2000 style
- Text Objects: on monitors with more than 100% scaling, when Windows UI style was set to “classic” Win2000 style, the text size appeared too small.
- SVG images: bugfix for images with base64-encoded embedded data that was split into junks separated by tab chars (this bug fix is the same as in Help+Manual 8.4.3).
New in HelpXplain 1.5.0.1428 (Apr 16, 2021)
- We have implemented custom HTML meta tags for easier social-media integration, added new arrange functions for objects and fixed a technical issue with audio files sometimes not playing on iOS Safari.
- Plus, the update supports 13 new languages for the DeepL translation tool, including Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Greek, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish.
New in HelpXplain 1.4.0.1345 (Apr 13, 2021)
- Version 1.4 comes with 2 new features important for social media sharing. It introduces a setting for custom meta tags. Some users have requested we should add additional social media meta tags (such as a Facebook App_Id). The new meta option enables this and a lot more.
- The second new feature is in the Publish dialog: an option to mask the viewport of the Xplain. When an Xplain is embedded in another HTML page, the host page normally restricts the viewport so that the view matches the aspect ratio of the Xplain.
- Social media sharing, however, often include direct backlinks to the Xplain HTML page directly. In this case, the Xplain runs in a new window or tab of the browser and the window size hardly ever reflects the aspect ratio of the presentation. As a result, some of the slides might become prematurely visible. The mask viewport option blacks out the browser window area which does not belong to the viewport.
- Other changes and bug fixes in version 1.4:
- The Publish dialog has an option to specify the maximum image size. If you use a lot of high-resolution images, reducing the size will significantly reduce the loading time of the Xplain on the web.
- HTML Editor: some glitches fixed, right-click menu implemented, shapes and callouts with text now automatically introduce a left and right margin.
- Recent files list: extended right-click menu has “Clear all” option
- Save translation file in .xliff format: the save function did not test for source-language compatibility, this has been added.
- Slide option “Stop Autoplay” did not work, if the slide contained an exit animation.
- Improvements in Powerpoint import
- Preview for skin customization: optical glitches fixed