
CHM format, as well as some security bulletins and patches. They have since announced their intentions not to develop the.
#Chm reader on mac windows#
CHM format further, and will be moving to a new generation of Windows Help called Microsoft Assistance Markup Language in the Windows Vista operating system.Ī CHM help file has a ".chm" extension. It has a set of web pages written in a subset of HTML and a hyperlinked table of contents. CHM format is optimized for reading, as files are heavily indexed. All files are compressed together with LZX compression.

Most CHM browsers have the capability to display a table of contents outside of the body text of the help file. The file starts with bytes "ITSF" (in ASCII), for "Info-Tech Storage Format". The format has been partially reverse engineered and there are container and internal files specifications available. On Windows computers, this help file can be compiled using hhc.exe, which is distributed at no charge with the HTML Help Workshop.

There are some open source tools which can read and explore these files (see for example xCHM, KchmViewer, GnoCHM, Chmox for OS X, Chamonix for OS X, Help Explorer Viewer, or the Firefox add-on CHM Reader), but they lack various features of the Microsoft Windows tools, most importantly a write support. On Windows, a CHM file can be extracted to plain HTML with the command. This will decompress all files embedded in filename.chm to folder extracted. On Windows, as a hack, select the topmost Topic, right-click and select Print. On the popup dialog, select "Print this heading and all subtopics.", click OK. Before selecting a printer, look in %HOMEPATH%\Local Settings\Temp for a file named ~hh*.htm. The image reference will refer back to the. On Linux systems which use apt as a packaging tool, a CHM file is extracted to plain HTML with (first command is for a Debian based OS)Īnother useful set of tools for CHM files in non-Windows environments is the CHM Tools Package. It's available as source code, and includes a program, chmdump, which extracts the HTML from a CHM file into a separate directory.
#Chm reader on mac for mac os x#
It's also available for Mac OS X via MacPorts.
#Chm reader on mac install#
In short: sudo apt-get install libchm-bin If MacPorts is installed on your system, you can type:Īt a Terminal prompt to install the package.Dv3500ea has a great chm2pdf answer, but I prefer to read them as html files.chm view for mac for mac os x# outdir/index.html to view the converted html files! Yaaay! Much better.chm view for mac install#


chm file, but I can also use my Chrome browser to search the pages for text, easily print, etc. Let's make a command called chm2html Here's a nice script I wrote.
