HTML Formatting

When viewing any HTML content via the Desktop edition of HelpMaster, you may see the following red label at the bottom of the HTML editor. This may appear in many of the HTML style textboxes throughout the product.

This label appears when an older and unoptimized style of HTML is detected.

Background

The November v21 release of HelpMaster uses a new HTML editor control (https://www.tiny.cloud/tinymce/) as a replacement for the text editor that previous versions had. The previous text editor created HTML that may have included many superfluous and repetitive HTML elements, such as font styling, sizing, margin padding, table padding and more. These tags bloated the HTML and made it bigger and more complex than it needed to be.

When this older-style of HTML is detected, HelpMaster will display this label at the bottom of the text editor.

Can I leave the text just as it is?

Yes. This label is just for informative purposes only. Although the HTML is not optimized, it will still work just fine - it’s just bigger and more verbose than it needs to be. If you do not edit / fix the HTML, this label will always appear for this text. Updating text with this label is recommended, however it’s not mandatory.

What does the “Auto Fix” button do?

Clicking the Auto Fix button will attempt to clean up the HTML and strip out any un-needed, or redundant tags from the old HTML. The “fixed” document will be displayed as soon as you click the button. You may notice slight changes in line spacing, and some text formatting. The clean-up process is not perfect, and may need to be manually tweaked - either via the WYSIWYG editor, or via the raw HTML (or both). If you are happy with the results, you can click the OK/Apply buttons to save the updated content. Once you save it, you will not be able to revert back to the old version unless you have a backup, or a duplicate copy of the HTML.

HTML Tables

You may wish to pay particular attention to any tables in the HTML - especially if they were imported from Word. In many cases, a cleaner, better looking table can be re-created from scratch using the built-in table designer in the new HTML editor. Use the Insert > Table menu option to insert a table, and then right-click it to adjust settings and properties.

Custom HTML

To view the raw HTML for the text editor, click the <> button on the toolbar. This will display the HTML which then be edited (it may be easier to copy this HTML to a dedicated HTML editor for better formatting, and then paste it back).