chm file support?

[Jerren]

Does anyone know if it is possible to index and search a M$ compiled help file? I have a lot of knowledge for a customer which is in .chm files we would like to have included in the portal until such time as we can get them all converted over to another format. (~5-6 months down the road in the current plan)

Is there a plug-in available or does anyone know of a good decompiler to say dump the files back into html that I could use as a possible workaround?

[Jerren]

Can I Assume by the total lack of response it's not supported and there are no plans to support it at this time?

[David]

It is definitely not supported at the moment. It is a binary file format (compressed HTML with a table of contents). So a plug-in would be required to support it.

We have no plans to support CHM at the moment. No one had been asking for it. We will be supporting the somewhat related MIME HTML format soon however (.MHT files).

A quick search on Google suggested that a CHM file can be extracted to plain HTML with the command

hh.exe -decompile extracted filename.chm

hh.exe is normally found in the c:\windows directory in Windows XP.

[Jerren]

Thank You

Yes we found a better shareware tool out there but we where hoping to simply keep the files intact due to some political issues with the client. Thank you for the response.

[David]

Maybe you can index the converted HTML file, then use the "rewritre links" option in Zoom to change the URL so that it points to the .CHM file instead. You'll have all the words indexed and search results pointing to the .CHM files.