Opening CHM file in Help & Manual

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Rob Walton
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Joined: Tue Sep 25, 2012 8:46 pm

Opening CHM file in Help & Manual

Unread post by Rob Walton »

One of our steps in releasing our product is to open a CHM file (produced by Sandcastle) in H&M, select "Convert help file and open" from the popup, then publish it as a WebHelp. Unfortuantely, this is a manual process, as there is apparently no helpman.exe command line option to do this sequence. As a result, we cannot automate this in a script.

Is there an option to open a CHM file and publish it as WebHelp using the command line? If not, is this capability available in a later release, or is it planned for a future release?
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Tim Green
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Re: Opening CHM file in Help & Manual

Unread post by Tim Green »

Rob Walton wrote:Is there an option to open a CHM file and publish it as WebHelp using the command line? If not, is this capability available in a later release, or is it planned for a future release?
This function isn't there because it's unnecessary and actually counterproductive. The option to import a CHM file is only there because you might sometimes have some important data that is only available in an old CHM. Normally, you would never convert a CHM to create WebHelp, because you would lose so many of the project features you need. You would create your WebHelp directly from the same project you used to create the CHM. That is the whole point of Help+Manual -- you can create any format from your projects at any time, getting all the features that can be created in your project at the same time. If you import the CHM version you lose all that, and also probably have to do a lot of unnecessary editing and formatting work as well. 8)
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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