Subfolders in CHM

Please post all questions and comments regarding Help & Manual 7 here.

Moderators: Alexander Halser, Tim Green

Post Reply
John Johann
Posts: 305
Joined: Mon Aug 21, 2017 7:35 pm

Subfolders in CHM

Unread post by John Johann »

According to the H&M help, CHM output is generated in a flat file structure, i.e. with no internal folders.

Is it possible to influence this?
The current system is built along calls from the application to NameOfHelp.CHM::/Folder/Filename.htm
User avatar
Tim Green
Site Admin
Posts: 23156
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
Contact:

Re: Subfolders in CHM

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi John,
According to the H&M help, CHM output is generated in a flat file structure, i.e. with no internal folders. Is it possible to influence this?
Sorry, but no. This is an absolute restriction. Help+Manual's entire HTML output is built around the concept of a flat directory concept with everything on the root level. Apart from anything else, this significantly reduces potential errors when authors add their own resources, because then they don't need to worry about paths.

The only exception to this is the new WebHelp 3 format, which is currently only supported by the V3 skins in the Premium Pack. That uses separate folders for CSS, JS and jstopics (JSON versions of topic content for fast loading), but also not for the topic files themselves, which are still on the root level of the WebHelp folder. Also, there the folder structure is used for internal reasons and can't be changed.

We may add support for folders in a future version but we are still very resistant to it. Since the output is auto-generated and not human-edited we still feel that it is a bad idea generally. The only exception might be really huge help systems with tens of thousands of topics, but they would need a completely different system to handle them anyway. For example, you would need a way to break up the table of contents into multiple files to make it manageable.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Post Reply