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Conversion of a .chm file

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8 replies

by nissanka.de.silva

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Hello
I beg some help from you all.
I have a .chm file. I want to convert it into a file
which could be read by my Linux. My Linux version is
Mandriva 2006. It is a 64 bit version.

The name of the file is:
Linux Debugging and Performance Tuning.chm

Could you help me, please?

8 replies

by stress junkie

CHM is not a common file name extension. I looked on google.com and searched for file+name+chm. There were several references but the first one that I looked at was here:

http://filext.com/detaillist.php?extdetail=CHM

According to this database there are at least three software applications that might use this file name extension. None of them appear to be appropriate for any kind of Linux manual.

In any case you have to find out what software would normally use the file before you can figure out how to convert it to something else.

One thing that I've tried successfully to determine what software created a file is to look at the file in a hex editor. If you have Gnome on your Linux machine then you can use the program ghex2 as follows:

ghex2 filename

ghex2 will display the file contents in both hexadecimal and in ASCII. If bytes don't map to an ASCII character it just prints a period in the ASCII column. You'd be surprised how often an application will put it's name and version in its data files. So just look for the name of some software application at the beginning or at the end of the file.

by nissanka.de.silva

Thanks stress junkie for the reply.

This .chm comes from Microsoft. It means something like compiled htm.
It is possible to convert it onto Linux compatible format.

I don't how to do it. There are some commands which I don't know.
Do you know those commands or some other help?

by stress junkie

I don't know if chm is restricted to Internet Explorer or what. It might be the Internet Explorer's way to save a web page with the graphics and embedded web links. The last time I used IE it would save web pages with graphics in a file with the "mht" extension. I haven't used IE in several years so I don't know what it is doing these days. Anyway if that's the case then you would need IE to read the file.

Can you go back to the web page and save it as PostScript? If you can do that then there are several viewers in Linux for PostScript files.

by apotheon

Microsoft's .chm file format is a binary file format used to contain hypertext markup for help files. When you click on a Microsoft program's little "help" thingie and it brings up those stupid little Help dialogs, it's accessing .chm files (CHM stands for Compiled Help something-or-other, maybe Markup -- I don't remember).

If you just want to be able to view .chm files, I recommend a little X utility called xCHM. I'm not sure what distributions include it in general in their package management systems, but I know it's available in the standard Debian archives. If nothing else, you should be able to get it at SourceForge:
http://xchm.sourceforge.net

by apotheon

Oh, yeah, another thing: I'm really suspicious of a file that purports to be about "Linux debugging and performance tuning" and is in a Windows binary help file format. Did you get that from a trustworthy source?

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