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Microsoft Compiled HTML Help

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Microsoft Compiled HTML Help is a proprietary format for online help files, developed by Microsoft and first released in 1997 as a successor to the Microsoft WinHelp format. It was first introduced with the release of Windows 98, and is still supported and distributed through Windows XP and Vista platforms.

Microsoft Compiled HTML Help

Filename extension Developed by Initial release Extended to .chm Microsoft 1997 .lit

HTML Help files are made with Help authoring tools. Standard(s) No Microsoft ships the Help Workshop with supported versions of Microsoft Windows and makes the tool available as a free download. There are also a number of third-party Help authoring tools available. The Microsoft Reader .LIT file format is basically a modification of the HTML Help CHM format. CHM files are sometimes used for e-books. In 2002, Microsoft announced some security risks associated with the .CHM format, as well as some security bulletins and patches.[1] They have since announced their intentions not to develop the .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.

Contents
1 History 2 Format 3 Design 4 Applications 5 Reading on other platforms 5.1 GTK 5.2 Qt 5.3 Other 5.4 Mac OS X 5.5 iPhone/iPod touch 6 Extracting to HTML 7 Other documentation file formats 8 See also 9 References 10 External links

History
Month Year Description February 1996 Microsoft announced plans to stop development of WinHelp and start development

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on HTML Help. August January July October March 1997 HTML Help 1.0 (HH 1.0) was released with Internet Explorer 4. HTML Help 1.3 shipped with Windows 2000. HTML Help 1.32 released with Internet Explorer 5.5 and Windows Me. HTML Help 1.33 released with Internet Explorer 6 and Windows XP. 2001 At the WritersUA (formerly WinWriters) conference, Microsoft announced plans for a new help platform Help 2, also HTML based. February 1998 HTML Help 1.1a shipped with Windows 98. 2000

January 2003 Microsoft decided not to release Microsoft Help 2 as a general Help platform.

Format
A CHM Help file name 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 reverse engineered by Matthew Rusotto with assistance from Peter Ferrie and an anonymous contributor known only as "pabs (at) zip (dot) to". Rusotto's documentation is freely available at http://www.russotto.net/chm/chmformat.html[1]. On Windows computers, this Help file can be compiled using hhc.exe. There are some open source tools which can read and explore these files, but they lack various features of the Microsoft Windows tools, most importantly write support. A CHM file can contain links to other CHM files. When opening such a CHM file for the first time, the HTML Help viewer creates an index file with the extension .CHW. The .CHW file contains all the index terms of the master and linked CHM files, and enables faster searching for indexed terms. [2]

Design
The format has the following advantages over other systems: File size smaller than plain HTML Range of formatting options that HTML gives for text presentation Ability to search the full text Ability to assemble several CHM files into one file with common TOC, index and search (see MSDN) Ability to Generate TOC and Topic Folders containing international characters. Standard HTML Help will not generate these correctly. The .chm file format's ability to contain and execute arbitrary code is a potential security threat. As such, the ability to view the file is often restricted by network security settings, and is affected by patches to the Windows operating system. HTML Help also does not fully support Unicode. [3]

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Applications
This format was originally intended only for encoding Help files, but other uses have since been found. It is very handy for packing saved HTML pages in one compact and browsable archive and for creating compact e-books. Some people use it to keep personal notes, because it can organize them in an ordered hierarchical table and allows quick text searching.

Reading on other platforms

GTK gnochm[2] CHMsee[3] FBReader Qt Okular kchmviewer[4] Kchm[5] chmcreator[6] Other xCHM Archmage[7] DisplayCHM CHM Reader Firefox addon[8] Mac OS X Chmox[9] iChm[10] ArCHMock[11] iPhone/iPod touch CHMate[12] iCHM[13]

Extracting to HTML
On Windows, a CHM file can be extracted to plain HTML with the command:
hh.exe -decompile extracted filename.chm

This will decompress all files embedded in filename.chm to folder extracted.

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or by using HTML Help Workshop. 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. This is the concatenated HTML. The image reference will refer back to the .chm file at the time of the "print". 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)
$ sudo apt-get install libchm-bin $ extract_chmLib tero.chm tero/

Another 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. It's also available for Mac OS X via MacPorts. If MacPorts is installed on your system, you can type:
$ sudo port install chmdump

at a Terminal prompt to install the package. You can then extract a CHM file with:
$ chmdump chmfile.chm outdir

Other documentation file formats

CHM has been replaced with .mht (Save As... Web Archive, single file in IE 8) Although documentation can be maintained entirely in a vendor-specific presentation format such as CHM, it is more often the case that documentation will need to be published in several different presentation formats at once: CHM, WinHelp, HTML pages, Java Help, PDF, and so on. As it can be expensive and prone to error to maintain multiple document formats separately, authoring documentation in a vendor-neutral authoring tool is often recommended. Tools from which several different presentation formats can be generated (such as DITA or DocBook) are often used so that all of the various presentation files produced (CHM or otherwise) are generated from the same sources this allows the information to remain consistent across different versions of the documentation.

See also
Windows Help Microsoft Help 2 KDE WAR (file format)

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Comparison of documentation generators

References
1. ^ WinWriters - Security and Microsoft Help 2. ^ Build Help Indexes in Advance, Microsoft Office Online 3. ^ INFO: Limited Unicode Support in HTML Help

External links
HTML Help Web Page on MSDN Microsoft Help 2 Reference (part of Visual Studio SDK for VS7.1 and VS8.0) History of HTML Help Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help" Categories: Internet Explorer | Technical communication | Online help This page was last modified on 2 January 2010 at 17:59. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Contact us

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