Home:Professional:Converting Windows Help to PDF

This note explains how to convert Micro$oft Windows Help topics into Adobe Acrobat files. With the Acrobat files, you can access the Help topics more easily, effectively, and portably than with Micro$oft's proprietary Help Viewer tool.

The naive method of printing the Help topic to PDF using Adobe Distiller doesn't work, because the Help Viewer craps out (ostentatiously running out of memory even when there is actually plenty available) trying to print more than half a dozen pages at a time.

WARNING While using any of the methods described in this note, it is your responsibility to ensure you are not infringing on any copyright or breaking other terms you have agreed to.

Requirements

What you need to complete this task:

Procedure

The key is realizing that a .CHM file is actually a bundled collection of HTML and other SGML files. The HTML files can be parsed and converted by Acrobat, whereas the SGML files can be converted into HTML by any simple procedure, such as the Perl script given below.

For each help topic you want to convert:

All pages under this domain © Copyright 1999-2003 by: Ben Hekster