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Converting CHM Files to Something ... Useful

By Adam Knight » Posted on February 20, 2007 - 11:00pm
Jamie Phelps asks:

Question

How can one convert CHM (Microsoft help files) to a more usable format such as PDF? I would like to import some of my ebooks into Yojimbo for reference storing.

Answer

It’s easier than you might expect. It also involves the Developer Tools, as you might expect.

Go get CHM Lib and download it somewhere. Go inside and:

./configure --prefix /usr/local/ --enable-examples
make; sudo make install

While /usr/local is the recommended location, you can put it anywhere.

Now in /usr/local/bin there’s a program called extract_chmLib that takes the CHM file as the first argument and an output directory as the second argument. Take the resulting directory of files and drop it onto Notae or the more expensive knockoff you mention and it should import just fine and be ready for searching.

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About Adam Knight
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Author Biography

Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c.

In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Switchblade) and has a few other toys coming out soon.

Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed].

Tubby
greycode on February 22, 2007 - 1:15am

Or if you’re not into building a cmd-line tool and would like a GUI solution, try the freeware expander Tubby

At the moment it seems that direct CHM-to-PDF conversion utilities for OSX aren’t quite here yet. (On the Windows side, where the .chm format originated, there are several)

Actually, what I’d really like to see is a Webkit plugin that would allow Safari to open/view a .chm directly…

Typo
Berko on February 22, 2007 - 9:57am

—prefix /usr/local/

should be

—prefix=/usr/local/

*shrug* worked for me that
Adam Knight on February 22, 2007 - 10:22am
Adam Knight's picture

*shrug* worked for me that way Smiling

Re: Converting CHM Files to Something ... Useful
Anonymous (not verified) on March 1, 2007 - 2:21am

http://chmox.sourceforge.net/

Re: Converting CHM Files to Something ... Useful
Anonymous (not verified) on August 21, 2007 - 10:03pm

DHM to PDF: use CHIMP. Only mac program I’ve found that does this.

Re: Converting CHM Files to Something ... Useful
Anonymous (not verified) on January 17, 2008 - 5:14pm

Where can I download Chimp? I’ve been looking all over for this, but can’t find it. Developers link is down for this app.

Re: Converting CHM Files to Something ... Useful
Anonymous (not verified) on July 15, 2008 - 10:51am

try

http://mac.softpedia.com/progDownload/Chimp-Download-9854.html

Note that Chimp costs $4.95 USD for the fully functional version. However, it’s unclear whether you’re purchase will actually yield you anything since the developer no longer seems to acknowledge this app. Try contacting him/her first. Otherwise, Google is your friend.

In my experience with Chimp, it did convert the file to PDF and seemed to do an ok job at it, but the PDF can’t be navigated by the Table of Contents nor the Index. However, I could still do a “Find”.

Re: Converting CHM Files to Something ... Useful
Anonymous (not verified) on December 9, 2007 - 9:18am

When you drop the folder into Notae, it doesn’t do anything!!!

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