Chinese Help file

[Robert van der Hulst]

With the help from a Chinese developer we are including Chinese help files (CHM) with our product.

H&M insists that we can only build this help file on a machine with Chinese windows (Chinese System Locale)
At the same time we also build a Help file (also CHM), generated with Sandcastle Help File Builder, with Chinese code comments. This works without problems on a US English Windows machine.
Creating a PDF and Webhelp for the Chinese help file works fine on the US English machine.

Can you explain why H&M insists that we need to run the CHM creation on a Chinese machine?
It would be nice if we would not have to bring up a Chinese VM every time to generate a new CHM file.
Editing the file on a US English window machine works fine.

Can we bypass this somehow ?

Robert

[Tim Green]

Hi Robert,

You don't have to use a full Chinese Windows but you must set the System Locale of Windows to the version of Chinese you are using and reboot before trying to compile Chinese CHM files. We can't say what your other system is doing to compile the Chinese CHMs, but this is absolutely necessary when compiling any extended character set CHM with the official Microsoft CHM compiler, which needs additional help from Windows for these character sets that is only available when the System Locale matches the language.

To do this open the International settings in the Windows Control Panel and select Advanced and then System Locale. If you can't find it -- Microsoft has been moving things around again recently to confuse users as much as possible -- type "system locale" into the search bar in the Settings panel and select "Language for non-Unicode programs" and set that to your Chinese variant and reboot.

[Robert van der Hulst]

Tim,
I don't understand why this is necessary and this is very unfortunate.
Switching the system locale and rebooting is not something that you can do in a build pipeline.
That means that we will have to keep doing this manually......
Is there a way that I can disable this check, so I can try to build the help file and check what the result is?

Robert

[Tim Green]

Please complain to Microsoft and ask them to update the CHM system that they have not touched or updated or even bugfixed since they released it in 1998.

And no, you can't generate CHM files with Unicode languages without changing the system locale. It's a Microsoft/Windows/CHM issue that has nothing to do with Help+Manual.

[Robert van der Hulst]

Tim,
It would be helpful if H&M could generate the Help source and then abort. At this moment it processes the TOC and does not generate the topic.
That way I could upload the source to a VM, call the Help compiler on the VM and then abort the VM again.
Now have to also install H&M on the VM.
I know I can also call H&M from the command line on the VM, but it would be easier if I just have to install the help compiler on the VM.
Background: I want to run this in an automated build on a build server, and the less that I need to install on that machine, the easier it is.

Robert

[Alexander Halser]

Please switch on the option in Program Options > Compilers Tab: Tolerant handling of Asian languages

This creates and compiles the CHM despite wrong system locale. We sometimes use that internally for quick testing. It's not Help+Manual that has a problem with the CHM export, it's the Microsoft compiler that treats the encoding of TOC, keyword index and full-text search wrong. The CHM is basically working, just all characters not in the ANSI 32-127 range will be displayed as question marks (in TOC, keyword index, but not in topics) and full-text search doesn't work for the same reason.

[Robert van der Hulst]

Alexander,
Thanks, that option worked.
And on my Windows 11 US English machine with this option enabled I was able to produce a Chinese help file that looks OK.
I have used HTML Help Workshop 1.3 from April 2000.

Robert