CHM vs HLP: fight!

[Valentino]

Christian, how about distributing TC help manual as CHM instead of HLP?
Long time ago, when CHM-like helps appeared I disliked them but later I got used to them and now find CHM more convenient to read and search (e.g. it's not possible to search for a word on a page in TotalCmd.hlp).

[W!ke]

HI,

Good plan as chm is better indeed.
Christian, if you need help on making the chm, please let me know, as I do it a lot for my job.

Greetings Mike.

[fabiochelly]

Support++++

CHM is automatically compressed and searching for words is supported.

[Maxwish]

If we all agree then there's no FIGHT, so just to keep the name of this topic right, I feel obligated to add the following:

No!
I disagree!
Don't change it...
I hate CHM

[Maxwish]

Disclaimer: Non of the expressions stated above reflect the true opinions of it's author.

[ghisler(Author)]

CHM isn't currently used because
- it's not supported by all operating systems (e.g. Win95)
- it requires some parts of MS Internet Explorer. There are several companies who refuse to install IE for security reasons.

[W!ke]

You got a point there Christian.
Forgot about those ones
As i'm used to work in an all MS world.

But maybe you should consider to make both a .hlp and .chm file.

Greetings Mike.

[soreno]

Does anyone know of a (free) hlp2chm tool ?

[W!ke]

Christian,

I think that only the files shdocvw.dll, and mshtml.dll are needed for chm's to work, not the whole IE engine.

Greetings Mike.

[fabiochelly]

CHM isn't currently used because...

It would be great to propose .chm AND .hlp.
With many tools (like "Help & Manual" for instance), you create your help just once and have the ability to compile it in both formats.

[Valentino]

2Maxwish
Thank you, you saved (almost) the balance of forces in Universe! Your bold font and weight of Christian's opinion make your two posts cost ten...

So, "Does anyone know of a (free) hlp2chm tool?"

[ghisler(Author)]

"Does anyone know of a (free) hlp2chm tool?"

I would be interested too! I tried the Microsoft Help file creation tool which can import RTF files (HLP sources), but the result is quite unusable:
- almost all formatting is lost
- clickable hotspots on images are lost too!

Any other tools which can do this?

[ford prefect]

Hello

I doubt that there is any really good 3rd party freeware tool for converting hlp projects to chm.
And as much as I hate to admit the HTML Help Workshop is really very poor concerning the conversion of hpj projects into hhp (.HLP 2 .CHM)
It can do only some basic conversions for simple help files.
The company which I'm (and W!ke) is working for owns a hi-professional tool called RoboHelp
This is an outstanding tool for any kind of help (HLP, CHM, Webhelp etc.) authoring/managing/converting... Sorry for the advertisement.
But the complexity of the tool is so huge that I really don't think that anyone would create such a precise freeware tool even if it would be just a simple HLP 2 CHM converter (see Micro$ofts example. And especially when you want to convert and image link as a map region on a image you won't get any positive results)

And now to my little experiment.
I deeply apologize for my H.... "reverse engineering" but I wanted to see what's the big issue by converting the TotalCMD.HLP
As not many people know decompilig an hlp is soooo easy. For this there are some freeware tools. But I used RoboHelp for the entire work of decompiling and converting the TotalCMD.HLP (from T-Com 5.50)
And here is the result TOTALCMD.chm (if you're not able to access the url look here under the "Total Commander Stuff")
As there is no topic file for the HLP help file the final CHM also does not include any topics

It might be worth trying if the trial version of RoboHelp offers this kind of functionality. (I personally never tested this)

Many greetings fly to W!ke
Hope you got some more word to this as I'm not so used to the RoboHelp and Help converting.

HSH (Hope Something Helps)

[W!ke]

Hi ford prefect

Yes indeed I worked with Robohelp.
I will check and see if there is a decent feature in robohelp which can make a topic contents.

Will get back about this.

Greetings Mike.

[W!ke]

Hi all,

CHM file is done.
Created a TOC.

Christian I mailed you the .chm file.
Let me know what you think.
All formatting is ok now, and links work great

Greetings Mike.