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Replacement for HTML Help Workshop #34
Description
In the prerequisites, you list HTML Help Workshop:
However there is no alternative for HTML Help Workshop from Microsoft (for chm based help).
But meanwhile the MS page responds with “Error 404 - Not found” and you have to go to archive.org for it. But you might be interested to learn that there is an alternative that I found in the Lazarus project. The free and open-source Lazarus IDE is delivered together with help in CHM format generated by a command line tool named chmcmd.exe, which can run independently, i.e., has no dependencies on other Lazarus libraries or tools.
In a Lazarus installation, the binary is located in [lazarus]\fpc\3.2.2\bin\x86_64-win64\chmcmd.exe, the source code can be found in [lazarus]\fpc\3.2.2\source\packages\chm\src\*.
See htmlhelp compiler - Lazarus wiki to find out more.
Of course, I can't give any guarantees, but I found that it does a better job in compiling my HPP projects to CHM files.
Activity
Wolf-SO commentedon Mar 21, 2025
Sorry, only now I see that I'd have better started a discussion for this.
myfreeer commentedon Mar 23, 2025
Glad to hear that found this open source alternative to the
hhc.exetool.After some experiments with the
chmcmd, it emits a lot of warning, and completed with ~2.95x time compared tohhc.The compiled file and the
chmcmdtool are attached below.cppreference-zh-20240915.zip
chmcmd-lazarus-3.8-fpc-3.2.2-win64.zip
readme: add a link to the alternative of hhc
Wolf-SO commentedon Apr 4, 2025
Thanks @myfreeer for testing the replacement. I didn't compare the timing though, as my projects are very small compared to cppreference, but it I was happy to see that the output sizes are comparable. In my case, the warnings issued by
chmcmd.exewere actually helpful in fixing bugs in the actual help projects. I therefore think it is possible that they could also prove useful for this project. I also received a return value fromhhc.exethat was irritating for GNU Make.