readme

CHM decompiler is a program that converts the internal files of CHM files back into the HHP, HHC, an

chmdeco -- decompile CHM files and extract files from ITS files (future)
Copyright (C) 2003 Pabs, <[e-mail]>

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA, 02111-1307, USA or visit:
http://www.gnu.org

About:

chmdeco is a program that converts the internal files of a chm back into
the files that were used to create it: .hhp, .hhc, .hhk, .stp, alias & map
files etc.

Other implementations:

The decompile function of KeyTools by KeyWorks Software (Win32 GUI only) does
pretty much the same thing, except that chmdeco does it much better. Also
KeyTools extracts all the files compressed into the chm whereas chmdeco relies
on other programs for this (for now). There are probably other Win32 help
authoring tools that do decompiling, but I don't know which ones.

Dependencies:

You need a program that extracts files from InfoTech Storage files
(.its/.chm), so that chmdeco can get at the internal files it needs. On
Unix you can use chmdump by Matthew T. Russotto, which is available from
http://www.speakeasy.org/~russotto/chm/ or chmlib by Jed Wing, which is
available from http://66.93.236.84/~jedwin/projects/chmlib/. On Win32 you
can use istorage, which was written by me & is both included in the binary
distribution and available from http://pabs.zip.to, in the programming
section.

Building, usage & testing:

On Windows:

1. The binary distribution contains prebuilt executables*.
2. Extract your chm by dropping it onto the supplied istorage.exe
3. Recreate the authoring files by dropping the folder that istorage produced
   onto the supplied chmdeco.exe
4. Open the #recreated subfolder in the folder that istorage produced,
   look at the files there, and compare them to the originals if available
*. If you want to compile a Win32 version grab the source, edit the Makefile
   and compile under Cygwin/MingW. Other compilers that support the opendir/
   readdir/closedir functions should be able to compile with no problems.

On Unix:

#You should have done the next 2 lines already
#wget http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/chm/chmdeco-<version>-src.tar.gz
#tar zxvf chmdeco-<version>-src.tar.gz
wget http://www.speakeasy.org/~russotto/chm/chmtools.tar.gz
tar zxvf chmtools.tar.gz
cd chmtools
make
cd ../chmdeco-<version>
make
cd ..
./chmdump/chmdump foo-bar.chm temp &> /dev/null
./chmdeco-<version>/chmdeco temp
less temp/#recreated/*.hhp
less temp/#recreated/*.hhc
less temp/#recreated/*.hhk
less temp/#recreated/*.stp
less temp/#recreated/*.ali
less temp/#recreated/*.h
diff -U foo-bar-authoring temp/#recreated > ./foo-bar.diff
less ./foo-bar.diff

Options:

Place these before any arguments they should apply to.

-p
	Turn on printing defaults in the [OPTIONS] section of the hhp
-b
	Turn off printing the blurb at the start of the hhp
-s
	Turn off printing the compilation stats at the start of the hhp
-h
	Print version and usage on stderr, then exit
-e
	Turn on converting the following characters in the hhc/hhk into entity refs
	& &amp;
	< &lt;
	> &gt;
	" &quot;