Review Links (mkstore)

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Erich Carshagen
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Joined: Mon Feb 13, 2017 4:25 pm

Review Links (mkstore)

Unread post by Erich Carshagen »

Good day,

We have a couple (40+) links to document using the internet address "mkstore" function, and any dead links are not identified when the chm file is published. Is there a way to 1) check them easily or 2) include the check in the publish function?

Thank you.
Erich
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Tim Green
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Re: Review Links (mkstore)

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Erich,

No, I'm afraid CHM doesn't include any intelligent functions like this. Microsoft created the CHM format with Windows 98 and effectively abandoned it right away. It is still "supported", in that it "works" in current versions of Windows, but they haven't touched the code at all since Windows 98. None of the developers involved in creating it are at Microsoft any more and the only way it now works at all is by patching Windows itself to accommodate it.. :x
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Simon_Dismore
Posts: 205
Joined: Thu Jul 13, 2017 2:57 pm

Re: Review Links (mkstore)

Unread post by Simon_Dismore »

Erich Carshagen wrote:dead links are not identified when the chm file is published. Is there a way to 1) check them easily?
I don't know about 'mkstore', but for conventional links you could try publishing to WebHelp and then running a broken link scanning tool on the output.
  • If you are publishing to the Internet, you can use the W3C link validator, which is slow but has other useful functions (e.g. reporting permanent redirects that need updating).
  • If you are publishing to an internal site or local machine, you'll need a so-called 'offline' checker, e.g. HTTrack. I don't think it is being actively updated, but it's still a useful tool, free and open-sourced (repository).
  • For more ideas, trying searching for "broken link checker".
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