CHMLIB is a library for dealing with Microsoft ITSS/CHM format files. Right now, it is a very simple library, but sufficient for dealing with all of the .chm files I've come across. Due to the fairly well-designed indexing built into this particular file format, even a small library is able to gain reasonably good performance indexing into ITSS archives.

Code now runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Irix.

Download chmlib-0.3.tgz , extract it, make. NOTE that you might have to edit the Makefile; it assumes that your gcc is called "gcc-3.2", just change it to "gcc". "su -c 'make install && ldconfig' ". Then "make examples", and the extract_chmLib executable will be created. Then, you can do "extract_chmLib file.chm directory" and everything in file.chm will be converted to HTML+images and stuffed into directory/ .

Yes, it's a kludge. It works though. Sounds like this is a decent candidate for something in KDE… just have the extract_chmLib thing called on the CHM file, put the results in a temp directory, launch Konqueror on that temp directory.

Matt G

> > If it is just normal *.HLP files you want to read then
> > wine/winhelp.exe works good enough.

>Strange, unfortunately, this is a .HLP file.  Winhelp from
>codeweavers-wine-20020904-7 just won't display it.  I get a blank
>window, and nothing to view.

Did you try the >> buttons? I have the problem with HLP files that no search dialog is displayed and you can only use the forward/backward buttons on the top. This is a bit cumbersome but at least you can look at the content. You only have to hope to hit an index page, from which point on it is easier then. :)

Gerhard Gruber

> > If it is *.CMH files you want to read, then your in trouble...
> > If it is just normal *.HLP files you want to read then
> > wine/winhelp.exe works good enough.
>
> I'm wondering how M$ opens its proprietary *.CMH file under windoze?

It's ".CHM", short for "Compiled HtMl Help", and it's done with something similar to the "chmlib" library I mentioned upthread. The file is decoded into individual HTML files (and images) with a single index file that shows up in a sidebar on I.Exploder. The gritty code-level specifics aren't something I've ever wanted to track down, but I'm sure it could be done with some Windows debugger if you cared.

> I tried "wine winhlp32.exe & " but it crashed:

Yeah, Wine does that. *shrug*. The old-style help files are compiled from an RTF file with a bunch of really weird formatting guidelines. I used to know more about this, but we decided to do the online help in .CHM format since it was easier and faster to write. If you can get the RTF file, you can probably strip out all the weird RTF codes and have a messy, but still human-parseable thing.

Matt G

>I tried "wine winhlp32.exe & " but it crashed:

That's because it uses HTMLHelp for these type of files. You can download this directly at the MS site, but it doesn't install under wine. If you have something like MSDN or such then you should have it installed already. Try looking for some hh.exe or hh*.exe in your windows directory (system32?).

winhlp32 works only with normal HLP files.

Gerhard Gruber