Convert rtf files to chm files ? Convert hlp files to chm files?

command-line rtf chm winhelp
Gurucharan Balakuntla Maheshku picture Gurucharan Balakuntla Maheshku · Aug 10, 2011 · Viewed 9.8k times · Source

We were shipping .hlp files to customers when development was in VC++. The process to create it was as follows:
1. Create rtf file
2. Create new project in WinHelp and then compile to get .hlp file.

Now development has moved to .net and also I found that we can no longer open .hlp files in windows 7 or vista.

I wanted to know if there are any free command line tools using which we can convert these .hlp files to a .chm file ?

Also I wanted to know if there are any free command line tools to convert .rtf file to .chm ?

Answer

Farish picture Farish · Jun 18, 2013

Microsoft has a tool which can convert Win Help projects to HTML Help. It is called HTML Help Workshop. You can open the existing .hpj project file with it and choose the option to convert it to HTML Help project .hhp. You can then compile the .hhp project with the same tool to generate the .chm file.

There are however many shortcomings in the tool. It generates an HTML page for each page in the rtf file but the naming of these HTML pages is random causing future referencing to be difficult.

If you just have the .hlp file and not the original Win Help project files, you can use a decompiler to generate the .hpj and .rtf files first and then convert them using HTML Help Workshop.

I found the following link quite helpful:

http://www.help-info.de/en/Help_Info_WinHelp/hw_converting.htm

EDIT: there are some 3rd party convertors and Help Authoring Tools (HATs) also available which may do the job better than HTML Help Workshop but most of them are not free.

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