How to open .CHM file using RoboHelp

[SaratGollapudi]

Hi All,

I am having a .CHM file generated with other than RoboHelp. I want to edit this .CHM file. But RoboHelp is not allowing me to open this file. RoboHelp is generating .CHM file with .XPJ input. What is the process of opening a .CHM file using RoboHelp? If any one knows about this let me know.

Thanks in Advance,
Sarat Chandra

[Peter Grainge]

Welcome to the forum

See the Reverse Engineering article on my site.

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Sarat and welcome to the RH community.

First of all, make sure that you do not have access to the source files that produced the CHM. If you have access to the source it will save you lots of time and trouble. Ask around. Maybe someone knows something about where the source is. Note that depending on what package was used to create the CHM and how old the source is, you may not find an .XPJ file.

If you really can't find any source, you can decompile the CHM to a folder (a similar proccess to extracting a zip file) using RH's inbuilt HTML Help Studio tool. This recreates the topics in a series of HTM files. Create a new RH project and import them in. The decompile also generates any browse sequence, glossary, TOC and index files. These you can copy into your new project's directory to overwrite the ones already there. Take backups before you do this just in case.

This will give you the basis of your help file but you may find that if topics had conditional build tags, variables or snippets that these will not be present. You can always copy across the , rhbuildtag.apj, rhsnippet.apj and rhvariable.apj files from another project if they use the same ones to start the process of reinstating them.


This article covers what I have added in some more detail.