Version 32 of Microsoft .chm Help Format

Updated 2005-12-08 18:10:11

This page contains information on how to create Compiled Help Module (.chm) files for applications that run under Windows. An alternative for Tcl developers is to use a Wikit in local mode as a help system. Tom Krehbiel


Access to chm from tcl: winhelp


TJK: I'm no expert but the following items may be helpful to others. Please add your own comments, tools and links.

  • A description of the file format can be found here [L1 ]
  • Abee Chm Maker is a program for making chm-files. It is free and can be downloaded from here [L2 ]. It has a simple and comprehensible interface that allow you to make CHM-files (with contents). I tried it on a simple problem, and it worked and seemed to be easy to use.
  • An X-Windows viewer for .chm files can be downloaded from here [L3 ]. lexfiend 4 Dec 2005: This and several other *nix-based CHM viewers uses the "CHM lib" library [L4 ], not to be confused with Matt Russotto's chmlib that can be found in his "CHM tools" package [L5 ].

Comments on .chm files.

DKF: "Isn't it HTML+postprocessing?"

PT: "Yes. MS issue a HTML compiler. You can take a web site and turn it into a chm file quite easily. You have to dig around in MSDN to find the package to download though. It used to be on the Platform SDK disk."

PT: It's called the MS HTML Help 1.4 SDK and you can download it from [L6 ] and view the documentation there.


With NT (?) and earlier, Microsoft's help format was .hlp, rather than .chm. Here [L7 ] are products which run under Linux (among other platforms) and understand .hlp's (never-publicly-documented?) format.


Category Documentation - Category Windows