Microsoft Compiled HTML Help: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:00, 18 March 2006

Revision as of 03:06, 27 March 2006

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'''[[Microsoft Compressed HTML Help]]''' is a proprietary format for [[Help (online)|online help]] files. They have a set of web pages written in a subset of [[HTML]] and a [[hyperlink]]ed table of contents. CHM format is optimized for reading, as files are heavily indexed. All files are compressed together with [[LZX (algorithm)|LZX compression]]. Most CHM browsers display a table of contents on the left.

A CHM help file has a ".chm" or ".CHM" suffixextension. The file starts with bytes "ITSF" (in ASCII), for "InfoTechInfo-Tech Storage Format".

There are some [[open source]] tools which can read and explore these files (see for example [http://xchm.sourceforge.net xCHM] or [http://gnochm.sourceforge.net/ GnoCHM]), but they lack various features of the [[Microsoft Windows]] tools.