How do I import .chm file content into RoboHelp 2022

[Glen7604_lrn]

We have several chm files that were written for in house applications and we want to update the content and re-publish in HTML.  There used to be tools in older versions of RoboHelp (HTML Studio I believe) but that seems to have been removed.  Can anyone point me in the right direction on getting the chm files converted? 

[Amebr]

First, try your account download page to see if you are able to download Robohelp 2019. The Classic version in that download still includes Help Studio. If you bought your subscription through a corporate account, use that account to check the available downloads.

Were the chms originally created in an old version of Robohelp? If so, those projects should be upgradable if you still have them, although you might need to do some tidy up.

If you have the source for the chms, even if they were created in some other tool, the topic files are HTML so will be importable. You'll need to manually create the toc and index I believe and probably tidy up some stuff. As they are all text files, you might also be able to use a regex tool to find and replace some of the older files into an appropriate format for use in RH20202, once you've looked at some working files in a sample project.

Or, if you only have the chms, try the Internet Archive links in this thread to download the HTML Help Workshop. From memory it can decompile chms. (Microsoft no longer provide links on their website, hence the Internet Archive option, which if they work, should be one of the safest download methods now.)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/265752/htmlhelp-workshop-download-for-chm-compil...

[Amebr]

Oh, and method 4 on Peter's site suggests a command line. I think hh.exe is available on any computer that can run a chm, so it should work given you can open the chm.

https://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/reverse_engineering/reverse_engineering.htm

[Glen7604_lrn]

Thanks Amebr, 

I dont have the original build files, only the .chm files.  They were most lkely created in MS Help Workshop which we no longer have and I have not been successful in finding a working download.  I have downloaded hh.exe but to no avial.  RH 2019 is no longer available thorugh the standard methods either only RH2020 and up.  I did see Peter's posts and it seems easy to decompile the .chm files; I just can't find access to the tools to do it.  I guess I will need to go through Adobe Support via our IT department is this this is part of an enterprise license.

Any other suggestions are welcome!

[Amebr · Accepted solution]

The internet archive link in the thread I posted before I think still works and is an archive of the microsoft site.

Or if you can't get the html help exe from adobe  I did some more poking around and discovered 7-Zip can extract the contents of the chm. You'll get a lot of files you can't use, but all the htm files should be available for you to work with.

[Glen7604_lrn]

Worked like a charm with 7-zip!  Looks like just the TOC and some minor formating tweeks to rebuild the project.

Many thanks, Amebr

[Amebr]

There might be a way to recover the toc. In the extracted files there should be a chm_name.hhc file. While the format is different, you might be able to write some regex to reformat it to match the new toc xml structure for RH2022 (the file is in toc folder in your project - you should add some nested and un-nested sections and topics in a sample project so you can see the full structure). 

This would probably only be worth doing if you have more than a couple of old chms to convert, but will be a time saver if you have 5 or 6 or more. 🙂